Campus bus network design and evaluation based on the route property

A campus bus network design and evaluation, taking Tsinghua University as an example, is investigated in this paper. To minimize the total cost for both passengers and operator, the campus bus system planning in a sequential approach is discussed, including the route network design, headway (i.e., the inverse of service frequency) optimization, and system evaluation. The improved genetic algorithm is proposed to optimize the route network based on the route property, and the impacts of the fluctuation of passenger demand and average traveling time are analyzed. The identity proportion in the headway optimization is then introduced with full consideration of its impacts. Based on the actual variety of passenger demand, a non-fixed schedule demonstrates its efficiency. VISSIM is finally adopted to simulate the campus bus system and a comprehensive evaluation system for the campus bus is developed. Compared with the current bus network and the one without considering the route property, the evaluation of the proposed approach shows an improvement of 18.7% and 10.1%, respectively. Moreover, the sequential approach shows an efficiency improvement over the alternative method. It is of great significance for the development of public transit systems in large industrial parks to decrease the total cost for both passengers and operator.