Shuttle Planning for Link Closures in Urban Public Transport Networks

Abstract

Urban Public Transport systems must periodically close certain links for maintenance, which can have significant e↵ects on the service provided to passengers. In practice, the e↵ects of closures are mitigated by replacing the link with a simple shuttle service. However, alternative shuttle services could reduce inconvenience at lower operating cost. This paper proposes a model to select shuttle lines and frequencies under budget constraints. A new formulation is proposed that allows a minimal frequency restriction on any line that is operated, and minimizes passenger inconvenience cost, including transfers and frequency-dependent waiting time. This model is applied to a shuttle design problem based on a real world case study of the MBTA network of Boston (USA). The results show that additional shuttle routes can reduce passenger delay in comparison to the standard industry practice, while also distributing delay more equally over passengers, at the same operating budget. The results are robust under di↵erent assumptions about passenger route choice behavior. Computational experiments show that the proposed formulation, coupled with a preprocessing step, can be solved faster than prior formulations.

Resilience in railway transport systems: a literature review and research agenda

“…Such precomputed alternative services represent so-called contingency plans which can be applied as a response strategy as soon as a specific disruption happens. In addition, in order to minimize the impact of a disruption, several studies suggested integration of bus services as substitutes to railway services during planned disruptions , and also unplanned disruptions (Gu et al, 2017;Jin et al, 2014;Van Der Hurk et al, 2016).…”

Assessing the Bus Bridging Effectiveness on the Operational Resilience of the Subway Service in Toronto

“…Other researchers have proposed an optimal temporary shuttle bus network to connect the disrupted rail stations based on the demand between the disrupted stations. Such methods have focused on optimizing the transit assignment on a temporary network of shuttle buses (22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28). This strategy is more applicable to planned disruptions than unplanned ones since new station-bus route connections can confuse rail passengers and bus drivers.…”

Optimization of Bus Bridging Service under Unexpected Metro Disruptions with Dynamic Passenger Flows

“…Firstly a column generation algorithm was used to generate candidate bus routes, then a pathbased multicommodity network flow model was established to optimize bus bridging network. Similarly, Van der Hurk et al [11] proposed a formulation to minimize passenger inconvenience cost including transfers and waiting cost with a minimal frequency constraint. Deng et al [12] developed a model to design bus bridging routes considering passenger route choice behavior and the bridging station capacity.…”

“…Constraint (10) indicates the relationship between variables x and y, and ensures that for any bus the origin of the first bridging trip should be its designated station. Constraint (11) indicates that the number of buses dispatched from any depot cannot exceed its fleet size. Constraint (12) prevents any bus from picking up passengers from a station unless it is visiting the station and enforces the bus capacity restriction.…”