Combined optimization methodology for operational planning and service policies: a case study of urban ropeway transport

The long-term efficiency of transport operator profit and the benefits for passengers conduce to opposite results. Actually, intervention by previous decision-makers to pursue one of the two goals generate opposite results on the other, forcing decision-makers to a difficult trade-off. The aim of this work is to provide a model that analyses, in an integrated perspective, operation and Service Policies (SPs), making an appropriate synthesis on both policies. This work proposes a cost-model formulation to optimize the merged operation and SPs to improve the current exploitation strategies according the service and maintenance activities. The proposed work is based on the following approaches : (i) a numerical model for the operation policy to determine the profit value of different working periods ; (ii) a stochastic process for the passenger flow that considers the uncertainty of passenger travel to compute the benefits according to their travel time ; and (iii) a cost-based optimization to bring together the operation and SPs. Finally, the proposed optimization model is applied to a massive urban ropeway operation of a public transportation system, in which the current SPs has been evaluated, considering the established transportation operation.