Integrated optimization of stop location and route design for community shuttle service

Abstract

The community shuttle system plays an important role in serving communities with a heavy travel demand for the metro service. Stop location and route design are the two main decisions of planning a community shuttle service. Those two decisions are interrelated and interact, and are strongly related to the user cost and operating cost. The optimal stop location and route can help to reduce the walking distance of passengers and the route length. To make a trade-off between the walking distance of passengers and route length, we propose a discrete optimization problem. A single integrated formulation is established to optimize stop location and route design. Planners can decide the stop location and route design of the community shuttle system simultaneously based on this formulation. Then, we present a non-dominated sorting genetic (NSGA-II) based algorithm to obtain the non-dominated solutions of the discrete optimization formulation. The numerical experiments and a case study based on real-world data are used to demonstrate that the proposed solution method can yield a set of plans of stop location and route in a reasonable time. We also find that when the maximum tolerable walking distance is set to 418 m, the trade-off between the total walking distance of passengers and route length can be obtained.