An Approach Based on Simulation and Optimisation for the Intermodal Dispatching of Public Transport and Ride-Pooling Services

Abstract

This paper provides a simulation and optimisation-based system to combine public transport (PT) with ride-pooling services (RP). According to the International Transport Forum (ITF), the RP could be established as a feeder of PT and included as the first or last leg of the journey with the option of transferring to/from PT in between. The system contains a dispatching core that uses an optimisation model with heuristic parameters to quickly analyse the potential permutations for each request. This topic is frequently based on simplistic modelling in the literature, and it has not been extensively tested in major urban regions. The whole metropolitan region of Barcelona is employed in this study, with a large realistic simulation model encompassing a 20 × 15 km area with a PT network of about 3000 stations and 300 route lines and nearly 114,000 traffic links. This enables for a more accurate evaluation of system performance and trip quality computation.