Model and Algorithm of Schedule Coordination in Regional Bus Transit with Multiple Transport Modes

This research studies ways to coordinate timetables in a regional bus transit with multiple transport modes to satisfy numerous realistic constraints, such as maximum and minimum departure intervals, by considering transfer among buses, subways, and passenger special lines with intersecting routes. The primary objective is to minimize the total waiting time for nontransferring and transferring passengers in all stops, while the secondary objective is to maximize the number of berths for all vehicles arriving at stations during a certain period. The constraint method converts the problem into a single objective programming problem. Based on the characteristic of the model, this study proposes an improved bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) design, which defines solution coding, redesigns the heuristic procedure to initialize chromosomes randomly, and uses the “ladder” concept to enhance bacterial foraging operation to resolve the problem. Finally, a numerical example is provided to reveal the differences in schedule coordination between single and multiple transport modes as well as to analyze the influence of the best schemes of station capacity. Furthermore, the improved BFO is compared with other intelligent algorithms to verify the model as well as the accuracy and effectiveness of the algorithm.