Zone-based public transport route optimisation in an urban network

Abstract

AbstractThe majority of academic studies on the optimisation of public transport routes consider passenger trips to be fixed between pairs of stop points. This can lead to barriers in the use of the developed algorithms in real-world planning processes, as these usually utilise a zone-based trip representation. This study demonstrates the adaptation of a node-based optimisation procedure to work with zone-to-zone trips. A core element of this process is a hybrid approach to calculate zone-to-zone journey times through the use of node-based concepts. The resulting algorithm is applied to an input dataset generated from real-world data, with results showing significant improvements over the existing route network. The dataset is made publicly available to serve as a potential benchmark dataset for future research.