Optimal Multi-Vehicle Transit Timetabling and Vehicle Scheduling: A Review

Abstract

The public-transport (transit) operation planning process commonly includes four basic activities, usually performed in sequence: network design, timetable development, vehicle scheduling, and crew scheduling. This work addresses two activities: timetable development and vehicle-scheduling with different vehicles types. Alternative timetables are constructed with either even headways, but not necessarily even passenger loads or even average passenger loads, but not even headways. A method to construct timetables with the combination of both even-headway and even-load concepts is developed for multi-vehicle sizes. The vehicle-scheduling problem is based on given sets of trips and vehicle types arranged in decreasing order of vehicle cost. This problem can be formulated as a cost-flow network problem with an NP-hard complexity level. Thus, a heuristic algorithm is developed. A few examples are used as an expository device to illustrate the procedures developed.