Operational Design for a Real-Time Flexible Transit System Considering Passenger Demand and Willingness to Pay

Internet-based transit services have the potential to enable fully connected, safe, reliable, efficient, and flexible service in the public transit system. The flexible transit system (FTS) allows passengers to make individual travel requests and receive customized door-to-door service by specifying their origins and destinations (OD), departure time range, and willingness to pay (WTP). Unlike the uniform and stable WTP in our previous paper, we consider an exponential decay function for the real pickup locations of passengers, and we proposed a joint design of two-level bus stops in temporal and spatial variations of travel demands. To ensure practical applications of this real-time FTS model, we combine the traversing method and the improved tabu search algorithm. A numerical example from Guangzhou is conducted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model and its effectiveness in reducing system cost.