Demand Responsive Feeder Bus Service Using Electric Vehicles with Timetabled Transit Coordination

Abstract

Traditional bus service in low-demand areas is usually designed with a low frequency planning strategy, where buses have to visit all fixed bus stops even though some do not have any passenger requests. To improve its efficiency and reduce the negative impacts on the environment, a user-centered service can be conceived by integrating the bus service as a feeder to transit. We study this problem considering also the use of electric vehicles, which are currently being widely introduced for such services. However, most studies neglect the synchronization issues of the feeder service and timetabled transit to minimize customers’ waiting time at transit stations. Moreover, existing studies on electric vehicle routing problems assume charging stations to be uncapacitated. To address these issues, this study proposes an on-demand first-mile feeder service to coordinate its service with timetabled transit using electric buses/shuttles. The problem is modeled on a departure-expanded (layered) graph and formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem. Several new contributions are proposed in this study: considering flexible bus stops based on meeting points (within a walking distance) of customers’ origins, coordinating bus arrival times at transit stations to minimize customers’ waiting time, and coordinating electric bus charging scheduling to ensure charging station capacity constraints. We conduct numerical studies on a set of instances to validate the proposed methodology.