Commuting Customized Bus Network Design Considering Price-Elastic Demand

As an important part of urban public transportation, customized bus fare system and route network are crucial to improving service quality and benign operation. In this work, we address a new commuting customized bus network design problem considering price-elastic demand. It aims to design a reasonable fare system and efficient route network. The objective is to maximize the total operating profit of considering penalty cost. We first formulate the problem as a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model. We simultaneously optimize customized bus routes, fares, travel time and passenger allocation. Based on problem properties, we develop an improved large neighborhood search algorithm (ILNS) to effectively solve the proposed model. Considering penalty cost, a greedy insertion operator calculating penalty cost during insertion process is designed to improve the algorithm's efficiency. Finally, computational results for a real case demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm.