Robust Stop-Skipping at the Tactical Planning Stage with Evolutionary Optimization

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2019

Subject Area

place - asia, place - urban, mode - bus, planning - methods, planning - service improvement, operations - performance, operations - frequency, operations - scheduling

Keywords

bus, stop-skipping, planning, performance

Abstract

The planning of stop-skipping strategies based on the expected travel times of bus trips has a positive effect in practice only if the traffic conditions during the daily operations do not deviate significantly from those expected. For this reason, we propose a non-deterministic approach which considers the uncertainty of trip travel times and provides stop-skipping strategies which are robust to travel-time variations. In more detail, we show how historical travel-time observations can be integrated into a Genetic Algorithm (GA) that tries to compute a robust stop-skipping strategy for all daily trips of a bus line. The proposed mathematical program of robust stop-skipping at the tactical planning stage is solved using the minimax principle, whereas the GA implementation ensures that improved solutions can be obtained even for high-dimensional problems by avoiding the exhaustive exploration of the solution space. The proposed approach is validated with the use of five months of data from a circular bus line in Singapore demonstrating an improved performance of more than 10% in worst-case scenarios which encourages further investigation of the robust stop-skipping strategy.

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Permission to publish the abstract has been given by SAGE, copyright remains with them.

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