Application of the Flow-Capturing Location-Allocation Model to the Seoul Metropolitan Bus Network for Selecting Pickup Points

Abstract

In the Seoul metropolitan bus network, it may be necessary for a bus passenger to pick up a parcel, which has been purchased through e-commerce, at his or her convenient bus stop on the way to home or office. The flow-capturing location-allocation model can be applied to select pickup points for such bus stops so that they maximize the captured passenger flows, where each passenger flow represents an origin-destination (O-D) pair of a passenger trip. In this paper, we propose a fast heuristic algorithm to select pickup points using a large O-D matrix, which has been extracted from five million transportation card transactions. The experimental results demonstrate the bus stops chosen as pickup points in terms of passenger flow and capture ratio, and illustrate the spatial distribution of the top 20 pickup points on a map.