Scheduling of Demand‐Responsive Transit Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents a vehicle dispatching procedure designed to minimize empty vehicle travel and idle time for a demand‐responsive transportation system. The method schedules the empty vehicle assignment between passenger drop‐off points and passenger pick‐up points by examining the times of drop‐offs and pick‐ups, and the travel times and distance between them. The minimization of empty vehicle travel and idle time is accomplished through the use of a linear programming transportation problem in which supply and demand vectors contain both location and time elements. The service area is divided into zones and the operating hours into time periods; the vehicle movements (loaded and empty) are processed as the movements between zones, and between time periods. The outputs of the model include scheduling instructions for each vehicle (both loaded and empty trips), estimates of vehicle miles and time, fleet size requirements to satisfy the passenger trip requests, and the identification of passenger trips which cannot be met due to fleet size limitation.