A Flexible Transportation Service for the Optimization of a Fixed-route Public Transport Network☆

In this paper, a flexible transportation service is proposed for a medium-sized city. By reviewing the literature of demand services, an algorithm solving the static multi-vehicle dial-a-ride problem with time windows and a fixed fleet of vehicles is developed and evaluated. Our contribution focuses on customers who specify their origin time from strategically chosen bus stations of the fixed infrastructure. A flexible objective function is used to reflect the customer's quality of service and also the operator's cost. Finally, simulated datasets of up to 500 user's requests are tested and compared against the public transport service of the city giving insight of how well a demand service performs. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.