Public transit coordination under different strategies between operators

This study is focused on an evaluation of public transit coordination between public bus and railway under different operation strategies between two operators. The policies of the operators in a multimodal and multi-operator transit system are categorised into three different strategies, namely cooperation, competition and independence. Each strategy is analysed in three coordination scenarios of non-coordination, common headway coordination and integer-ratio headway coordination, for the off-peak period. The objective is to assess the most advisable coordination method under respective operation policy. The objective functions in non-coordination and common headway coordination scenarios are nonlinear programming problems, and that for integer-ratio headway coordination is a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem due to the integer property of the ratio between headway of bus and headway of rail. An optimisation software AIMMS is employed to solve these objective functions. Results showed that in an integrated multimodal and multi-operator transit system, integer-ratio headway coordination can be an efficient and feasible method in coordination operations and furthermore, a policy of cooperation between the operators is an efficient strategy that can reduce the total cost of transit system while improving coordination; whereas a policy of competition between operators is the least efficient when making coordination operations within each operator's scope.