Demand Responsive Feeder Transit Scheduling with Flexible Service Quality

Demand responsive feeder transit is a transportation mode providing transportation service between travel destinations or origins and hub stations. In order to exploit the flexibility of the demand responsive feeder transit system while maintaining its economy, this paper introduces travel freedom of requests in terms of range of service quality of potential trip predefined by requests while reserving the transportation service as part of the constraints to the demand responsive feeder transit systems. The reserved service quality includes the range of satisfactory and acceptable qualities, where transportation service with acceptable quality is only accepted with certain discount. The service quality is represented as a metric called detour coefficient, which is the proportion of the trip time according to the vehicle schedules to the direct driving time between the travel origin and destination of a request. An optimization model for scheduling the proposed system is formulated followed by the development of a customized simulated annealing solution approach based on the characteristics of the proposed problem. The solution method is verified and validated through computational experiment on a randomly generated instance.