This paper presents a global review of the crucial strategic and tactical steps of transit planning: the design and scheduling of the network. These steps influence directly the quality of service through coverage and directness concerns but also the economic profitability of the system since operational costs are highly dependent on the network structure. We first exhibit the context and the goals of strategic and tactical transit planning. We then establish a terminology proposal in order to name sub-problems and thereby structure the review. Then, we propose a classification of 69 approaches dealing with the design, frequencies setting, timetabling of transit lines and their combinations. We provide a descriptive analysis of each work so as to highlight their main characteristics in the frame of a two-fold classification referencing both the problem tackled and the solution method used. Finally, we expose recent context evolutions and identify some trends for future research. This paper aims to contribute to unification of the field and constitutes a useful complement to the few existing reviews.

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Transit network design and scheduling: A global review

http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/188944/1/Content.pdf?accept=1

A review of urban transportation network design problems

This paper critically reviews applications of metaheuristics for solving the Transit Route Network Design Problem (TRNDP). A structured review is offered and prominent metaheuristics for tackling the TRNDP are evaluated, according to a benchmark network. The review findings yield a unified implementation framework, which contains common algorithmic components and different solution representations and methods, which are considered important for obtaining solutions of good quality. The paper concludes with identified gaps in research and opportunities for future research on the application of metaheuristic algorithms for solving the TRNDP.

Metaheuristics for the transit route network design problem: a review and comparative analysis

A multi-objective meta-heuristic approach for transit network design and frequency setting problem in a bus transit system

The transit route network design (TRND) problem seeks a set of bus routes and schedules that is optimal in the sense that it maximizes the utility of an urban bus system for passengers while minimizing operator cost. Because of the computational intractability of the problem, finding an optimal solution for most systems is not possible. Instead, a wide variety of heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches have been applied to the problem to attempt to find near-optimal solutions. This paper presents an optimization system that synthesizes aspects of previous approaches into a scalable, flexible, intelligent agent architecture. This architecture has successfully been applied to other transportation and logistics problems in both research studies and commercial applications. This study shows that this intelligent agent system outperforms previous solutions for both a benchmark Swiss bus network system and the very large bus system in Delhi, India. Moreover, the system produces in a single run a set of Pareto equivalent solutions that allow a transit operator to evaluate the trade-offs between operator costs and passenger costs.

Intelligent Agent Optimization of Urban Bus Transit System Design

This study develop an optimization model for bus transit network based on road network and zonal OD. The model aims at achieving minimum transfers and maximum passenger flow per unit length with line length and non-linear rate as constraints. The coarse-grain parallel ant colony algorithm (CPACA) is used to solve the problem. To effectively search the global optimal solution, we use a heuristic pheromone distribution rule, by which ants' path searching activities are adjusted according to the objective value. Parallel ACA is carried out for shortening the calculation time. The model is tested with survey data of Dalian city. The results show that an optimized bus network with less transfers and travel time can be obtained, and the application of CPACA effectively increases the calculation speed and quality.

Chong Liu

Papers

Optimizing bus transit network with parallel ant colony algorithm