Development of a hybrid fuzzy genetic algorithm model for solving transportation scheduling problem

Abstract

There has been an increasing public demand for passenger rail service in the recent times leading to a strong focus on the need for effective and efficient use of resources and managing the increasing passenger requirements, service reliability and variability by the railway management. Whilst shortening the passengers' waiting and travelling time is important for commuter satisfaction, lowering operational costs is equally important for railway management. Hence, effective and cost optimised train scheduling based on the dynamic passenger demand is one of the main issues for passenger railway management. Although the passenger railway scheduling problem has received attention in operations research in recent years, there is limited literature investigating the adoption of practical approaches that capitalize on the merits of mathematical modeling and search algorithms for effective cost optimization. This paper develops a hybrid fuzzy logic based genetic algorithm model to solve the multi-objective passenger railway scheduling problem aiming to optimize total operational costs at a satisfactory level of customer service. This hybrid approach integrates genetic algorithm with the fuzzy logic approach which uses the fuzzy controller to determine the crossover rate and mutation rate in genetic algorithm approach in the optimization process. The numerical study demonstrates the improvement of the proposed hybrid approach, and the fuzzy genetic algorithm has demonstrated its effectiveness to generate better results than standard genetic algorithm and other traditional heuristic approaches, such as simulated annealing.