Joint optimisation of regular and demand-responsive transit services

This study aims to jointly optimise regular and demand responsive transit (DRT) services, which can offer opportunities for leveraging on their respective advantages. An optimisation model with the objective of minimising the total travel time of passengers and the total fleet size is proposed. The terminal bus stops of regular bus lines, the service area of the DRT, and the fleet size of both regular and DRT are optimised simultaneously. A rule-based optimisation preparation step is added to the proposed model to obtain a reasonable design scheme and to reduce the computational load. The model is solved using a tailored boundary-start-based two-step heuristic algorithm. The performance of the mixed network is affected by the preference of the decision maker and the operation mode adopted for the DRT service. A reduction in the operational level of the DRT results in a considerable increase in the travel time of DRT passengers.