Rural Bus Route Design Problem: Model Development and Case Studies

Abstract

Rural and suburban areas have a low density of population. The bus services for these areas have unique features such as no transfer exists as there is only one bus route for each area and nearly all passengers travel to the same destination of city center. These features make the design of suburban bus route a practical and interesting research topic. We formulate such a suburban bus route design problem as an optimization model. We subsequently prove that the problem is NP-hard. In view of the problem structure, a dynamic programming approach is developed to obtain the optimal solution efficiently for practical-size problems. The optimal solution contains information on which one of the two bus stops on both sides of a street to visit and the sequence of visiting the chosen bus stops. Two case studies based on a square-block example and a suburb in Australia are carried out to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model and method.