bus network
On the Role of Multi-Objective Optimization to the Transit Network Design Problem
Silva, Vasco D., Finamore, Anna, Henriques, Rui
Ongoing traffic changes, including those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, reveal the necessity to adapt our public transport systems to the ever-changing users' needs. This work shows that single and multi objective stances can be synergistically combined to better answer the transit network design problem (TNDP). Single objective formulations are dynamically inferred from the rating of networks in the approximated (multi-objective) Pareto Front, where a regression approach is used to infer the optimal weights of transfer needs, times, distances, coverage, and costs. As a guiding case study, the solution is applied to the multimodal public transport network in the city of Lisbon, Portugal. The system takes individual trip data given by smartcard validations at CARRIS buses and METRO subway stations and uses them to estimate the origin-destination demand in the city. Then, Genetic Algorithms are used, considering both single and multi objective approaches, to redesign the bus network that better fits the observed traffic demand. The proposed TNDP optimization proved to improve results, with reductions in objective functions of up to 28.3%. The system managed to extensively reduce the number of routes, and all passenger related objectives, including travel time and transfers per trip, significantly improve. Grounded on automated fare collection data, the system can incrementally redesign the bus network to dynamically handle ongoing changes to the city traffic.
Micro-interventions in urban transport from pattern discovery on the flow of passengers and on the bus network
Caminha, Carlos, Furtado, Vasco, Ponte, Vládia Pinheiro e Caio
In this paper, we describe a case study in a big metropolis, in which from data collected by digital sensors, we tried to understand mobility patterns of persons using buses and how this can generate knowledge to suggest interventions that are applied incrementally into the transportation network in use. We have first estimated an Origin-Destination matrix of buses users from datasets about the ticket validation and GPS positioning of buses. Then we represent the supply of buses with their routes through bus stops as a complex network, which allowed us to understand the bottlenecks of the current scenario and, in particular, applying community discovery techniques, to identify clusters that the service supply infrastructure has. Finally, from the superimposing of the flow of people represented in the OriginDestination matrix in the supply network, we exemplify how micro-interventions can be prospected by means of an example of the introduction of express routes.