Optimization of Rural Demand-Responsive Transportation through Transfer Point Allocation

Rural mobility has a lack of innovative proposals in contrast with its urban counterpart. This research aims to bring solutions that ease the implementation of reliable and flexible rural transportation. Demand-responsive transportation is chosen to develop a public transportation service providing interurban trips among several rural settlements. Given the characteristics of rural displacement demand, a novel approach is introduced to optimize the service's economic costs: the dynamic transfer point allocation. The problem is fully formulated and an architecture is introduced describing the workflow of the whole system. Data from an interurban bus transportation service are used to build a case study of a rural area of Valencia, Spain, and develop several examples illustrating the benefits of the proposed approach. The results reveal that the dynamic creation of transfer points can simplify the transportation fleet's itineraries and boost the amount of served travel requests. Finally, a discussion of the benefits and dangers of flexible features in rural transportation is developed, underscoring the need to achieve a balance between dynamic operation and service quality.