Designing mass-customized service subject to public grid-like network constraints

Abstract

The paper introduces the concept of a fractal topology routes network (FTRN) in which different transportation modes interact with each other via distinguished subsets of common shared hubs as to provide a variety of mass customized passenger services. Passenger flows following assumed set of travel destinations transit through different transportation modes. The network of repetitively acting local transportation modes routed along road loops of FTRN structure provides a framework for passengers’ origin-destination trip routing and scheduling. In that context, first of all some mass-customized services following presumed scenarios caused by seasonal timetable changes and major sporting events or other special events, e.g. emergency transportation ones, have to be assessed in advance. In general case such problems belong to NP-hard ones. However, the passenger travel schedules can be estimated easily while taking into account both structural features of transportation network, e.g. its regularity, and cyclic behaviour of local transportation modes employed in FTRN. Therefore, the goal is to provide a declarative model allowing one to formulate a constraint satisfaction problem enabling assessment of a city network period as well as development of conditions guaranteeing the right match-up of local transportation line schedules to a given passenger flow itineraries.