Dynamic vehicle routing problem for flexible buses considering stochastic requests

•A demand responsive flexible bus system is proposed using minibuses and the bus route changes in real-time to service the dynamic demand.•A two-stage stochastic programming model with recourse is constructed to handle the dynamic current requests and stochastic future requests.•A vector-similarity-based clustering and adaptive large neighborhood searching solution algorithm is proposed to solve the problem.•The proposed framework is tested under four real cases in Shanghai based on the taxi order data.