Since the demand for passenger transport is ever increasing, public transport planning is a topic of ongoing research. While single problem stages like line planning, timetabling or vehicle scheduling are already extensively researched, integrated planning, i.e., planning not just one but multiple problem stages simultaneously, becomes more important, since integration allows to utilize additional optimization potential that is not realizable in sequential planning. This thesis focuses especially on cost-optimal planning, since a cost-efficient system allows for a more sustainable service f...
This book is one of the first to include an extensive discussion of integrated public transport planning. In times of growing urban populations and increasing environmental awareness, the importance of optimizing public transport systems is ever-developing. Three different aspects are presented: line planning, timetabling, and vehicle scheduling. Classically, challenges concerning these three aspects of planning are solved sequentially. Due to their high interdependence, the author presents a clear and detailed analysis of innovative, integrated models with accompanied numerical experiments performed to assess, and often support, the benefits of integration. The book will appeal to a wide readership ranging from graduate students to researchers.
This book treats three planning problems arising in public railway transportation planning: line planning, timetabling, and delay management, with the objective to minimize passengers’ travel time. While many optimization approaches simplify these problems by assuming that passengers’ route choice is independent of the solution, this book focuses on models which take into account that passengers will adapt their travel route to the implemented planning solution. That is, a planning solution and passengers’ routes are determined and evaluated simultaneously. This work is technically deep, with insightful finding regarding complexity and algorithmic approaches to public transportation problems with integrated passenger routing. It is intended for researchers in the fields of mathematics, computer science, or operations research, working in the field of public transportation from an optimization standpoint. It is also ideal for students who want to gain intuition and experience in doing complexity proofs and designing polynomial-time algorithms for network problems. The book models line planning, timetabling and delay management as combined design and routing problems on networks. In a complexity analysis, the border between NP-hard and polynomially solvable problems is illustrated. Based on that, the insights gained are used to develop solution approaches for the considered problems. Besides integer programming formulations, a heuristic method iterating planning and routing step is proposed to solve the problems.
This book develops models, results and algorithms for optimizing public transportation from a customer-oriented viewpoint. The methods used are based on graph-theoretic approaches and integer programming. The specific topics are all motivated by real-world examples which occurred in practical projects: location of stops, management of delay, and tariff zone design. An appendix summarizes some of the basics of optimization needed to interpret the material in the book.
This thesis describes the algorithm IS-OPT that integrates scheduling of vehicles and duties in public bus transit. IS-OPT is the first algorithm which solves integrated vehicle and duty scheduling problems arising in medium sized carriers such that its solutions can be used in daily operations without further adaptions. This thesis is structured as follows: The first chapter highlights mathematical models of the planning process of public transit companies and examines their potential for integrating them with other planning steps. It also introduces descriptions of the vehicle and the duty scheduling problem. Chapter 2 motivates why it can be useful to integrate vehicle and duty scheduling, explains approaches of the literature, and gives an outline of our algorithm IS-OPT. The following chapters go into the details of the most important techniques and methods of IS-OPT: In Chapter 3 we describe how we use Lagrangean relaxation in a column generation framework. Next, in Chapter 4, we describe a variant of the proximal bundle method (PBM) that is used to approximate linear programs occurring in the solution process. We introduce here a new variant of the PBM which is able to utilize inexact function evaluation and the use of epsilon-subgradients. We also show the convergence of this method under certain assumptions. Chapter 5 treats the generation of duties for the duty scheduling problem. This problem is modeled as a resourceconstraint-shortest-path problem with non-linear side constraints and nearly linear objective function. It is solved in a two-stage approach. At first we calculate lower bounds on the reduced costs of duties using certain nodes by a new inexact label-setting algorithm. Then we use these bounds to speed up a depth-first-search algorithm that finds feasible duties. In Chapter 6 we present the primal heuristic of IS-OPT that solves the integrated problem to integrality. We introduce a new branch-and-bound based heuristic which we call rapid branching. Rapid branching uses the proximal bundle method to compute lower bounds, it introduces a heuristic node selection scheme, and it utilizes a new branching rule that fixes sets of many variables at once. The common approach to solve the problems occurring in IS-OPT is to trade inexactness of the solutions for speed of the algorithms. This enables, as we show in Chapter 7, to solve large real world integrated problems by IS-OPT. The scheduled produced by IS-OPT save up to 5% of the vehicle and duty cost of existing schedules of regional and urban public transport companies.
This volume consists of selected papers presented at the Ninth International Conference on Computer-Aided Scheduling of Public Transport. Coverage includes the use of computer-aided methods and operations research techniques to improve: information management; network and route planning; vehicle and crew scheduling and rostering; vehicle monitoring and management; and practical experience with scheduling and public transport planning methods.
This book shows how transit assignment models can be used to describe and predict the patterns of network patronage in public transport systems. It provides a fundamental technical tool that can be employed in the process of designing, implementing and evaluating measures and/or policies to improve the current state of transport systems within given financial, technical and social constraints. The book offers a unique methodological contribution to the field of transit assignment because, moving beyond “traditional” models, it describes more evolved variants that can reproduce:• intermodal networks with high- and low-frequency services;• realistic behavioural hypotheses underpinning route choice;• time dependency in frequency-based models; and• assumptions about the knowledge that users have of network conditionsthat are consistent with the present and future level of information that intelligent transport systems (ITS) can provide. The book also considers the practical perspective of practitioners and public transport operators who need to model and manage transit systems; for example, the role of ITS is explained with regard to their potential in data collection for modelling purposes and validation techniques, as well as with regard to the additional data on network patronage and passengers’ preferences that influences the network-management and control strategies implemented. In addition, it explains how the different aspects of network operations can be incorporated in traditional models and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. Lastly, the book provides practical information on state-of-the-art implementations of the different models and the commercial packages that are currently available for transit modelling. Showcasing original work done under the aegis of the COST Action TU1004 (TransITS), the book provides a broad readership, ranging from Master and PhD students to researchers and from policy makers to practitioners, with a comprehensive tool for understanding transit assignment models.
Addresses the Challenges Facing Public Transport Policy Makers and OperatorsPublic Transit Planning and Operation: Modeling, Practice and Behavior, Second Edition offers new solutions for delivering both better services and greater efficiency, solutions which have been developed and tested by the author in over thirty years of research work with ma
The growing mobility needs of travellers have led to the development of increasingly complex and integrated multi-modal transit networks. Hence, transport agencies and transit operators are now more urgently required to assist in the challenging task of effectively and efficiently planning, managing, and governing transit networks. A pre-condition for the development of an effective intelligent multi-modal transit system is the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) tools that will support the needs of transit operators and travellers. To achieve this, reliable real-time simulation and short-term forecasting of passenger demand and service network conditions are required to provide both real-time traveller information and successfully synchronise transit service planning and operations control. Modelling Intelligent Multi-Modal Transit Systems introduces the current trends in this newly emerging area. Recent developments in information technology and telematics have enabled a large amount of data to become available, thus further attracting transport researchers to set up new models outside the context of the traditional data-driven approach. The alternative demand-supply interaction or network assignment modelling approach has improved greatly in recent years and has a crucial role to play in this new context.
