Improving flex-route transit services with modular autonomous vehicles
Journal article, 2021

With the advent of modular autonomous vehicles (MAVs), this paper presents a novel operational design for flex-route transit services to reduce operation costs of vehicles and improve the service quality of customers. The regime allows the simultaneous dispatch of a certain amount of MAVs from a bus terminal at a departure time. Each MAV is allowed to visit customers freely outside of checkpoints. Self-adaptive capacity and flexible service mode adapt time- and space-dependent demand characteristics. The presented operational design is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program that is NP-hard. A two-stage solution framework is developed to decompose the proposed mathematical programming cautiously. In the first stage, customized dynamic programming with valid cuts is designed to solve a bus scheduling problem efficiently. In the second stage, an effective and fast heuristic is proposed to solve a variant of the dial-a-ride problem and satisfy the technical requirements for developing on-line applications. Numerical examples and a case study show the effectiveness of the proposed design by comparing the flex-route transit services using traditional vehicles.

On-line application

Modular autonomous vehicle

Dynamic programming

Flex-route transit

Author

Xiaohan Liu

Beihang University

Xiaobo Qu

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Geology and Geotechnics

Xiaolei Ma

Beihang University

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review

1366-5545 (ISSN)

Vol. 149 102331

Subject Categories

Computational Mathematics

Transport Systems and Logistics

Computer Systems

DOI

10.1016/j.tre.2021.102331

More information

Latest update

5/6/2021 2