Integrating Passenger Incentives to Optimize Routing for Demand-Responsive Customized Bus Systems

The customized bus (CB) is an alternative public transportation mode that extends the flexibility and coverage of the fixed-route transit networks. It allows passengers to make reservations for trips and arranges vehicles to serve shared rides. However, the operation performance is limited to vehicle routing, the number of stops, and the length of detour times. Extra detours and stops would not be significantly avoided if deploying high-capacity vehicles. The demand control aspect is a possible way out. Releasing incentives to passengers can attract them to aggregated locations and reduce the vehicle detour times. How to determine an appropriate incentive scheme for passengers is the critical problem. This paper presents an approach to integrating the disaggregated trip choice model with the vehicle routing model to determine incentive schemes. First, the discrete choice model is established to bridge the passengers’ trip choice probabilities with the influence of monetary incentives, walking time, and travel time. A vehicle routing model based on the pickups and deliveries problem is then adopted to generate the routes and schedules of vehicles to serve the influenced passengers. The result shows that the proposed approach can reduce the total running kilometers, shorten the onboard time, and increase the profits. The analysis also suggests that passengers’ sensitivity towards incentives is decisive to the result.