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Improving flex-route transit services with modular autonomous vehicles

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  • Liu, Xiaohan
  • Qu, Xiaobo
  • Ma, Xiaolei

Abstract

With the advent of modular autonomous vehicles (MAVs), this paper presents a novel operational design for flex-route transit services to reduce operation costs of vehicles and improve the service quality of customers. The regime allows the simultaneous dispatch of a certain amount of MAVs from a bus terminal at a departure time. Each MAV is allowed to visit customers freely outside of checkpoints. Self-adaptive capacity and flexible service mode adapt time- and space-dependent demand characteristics. The presented operational design is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program that is NP-hard. A two-stage solution framework is developed to decompose the proposed mathematical programming cautiously. In the first stage, customized dynamic programming with valid cuts is designed to solve a bus scheduling problem efficiently. In the second stage, an effective and fast heuristic is proposed to solve a variant of the dial-a-ride problem and satisfy the technical requirements for developing on-line applications. Numerical examples and a case study show the effectiveness of the proposed design by comparing the flex-route transit services using traditional vehicles.

Suggested Citation

  • Liu, Xiaohan & Qu, Xiaobo & Ma, Xiaolei, 2021. "Improving flex-route transit services with modular autonomous vehicles," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:transe:v:149:y:2021:i:c:s1366554521001046
    DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102331
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    References listed on IDEAS

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