Generic approaches for the rescheduling of public transport services

Abstract

The current paper discusses the problem of the synchronization of public transit services through the rescheduling of their initial execution times. The objective of the analysis is the minimization of waiting time that occurs for passengers when they embark on journeys through a co-modal or a unimodal public transport network. Fundamental concepts of public transport and co-modality are discussed, and particular focus is given to the development of approaches that are practical and can be applied to the whole network and not just to some parts of it. Three instances of the problem of rescheduling are presented and further analyzed, and corresponding mixed integer-linear programming models are developed for their solution. The mathematical models aim to be flexible and applicable to a broad set of available datasets that have been homogenized according to the general transit feed specification. Parameters are used in the approaches in order to define the degree to which we want to change the existing way that services operate. Case studies are presented for Greek, Czech, and Slovak public transport networks, in which reductions from 1 to 20% in the overall waiting time of passengers are obtained. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.