Planning and Optimizing Transit Lines

TL;DR

This paper reviews models for transit line planning, focusing on how route and frequency decisions impact operational performance, including under uncertainty, with an emphasis on mathematical programming approaches.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of transit line planning models, highlighting the interplay of passenger routes, frequency, and capacity across different aggregation levels.

Findings

Models incorporate passenger behavior, capacity constraints, and uncertainty.

Decomposition into line generation, selection, and frequency setting aids planning.

Mathematical programming is a common framework for these models.

Abstract

For all line-based transit systems like bus, metro and tram, the routes of the lines and the frequencies at which they are operated are determining for the operational performance of the system. However, as transit line planning happens early in the planning process, it is not straightforward to predict the effects of line planning decisions on relevant performance indicators. This challenge has in more than 40 years of research on transit line planning let to many different models. In this chapter, we concentrate on models for transit line planning including transit line planning under uncertainty. We pay particular attention to the interplay of passenger routes, frequency and capacity, and specify three different levels of aggregation at which these can be modeled. Transit line planning has been studied in different communities under different names.The problem can be decomposed into the components line generation, line selection, and frequency setting. We include publications that regard one of these individual steps as well as publications that combine two or all of them. We do not restrict to models build with a certain solution approach in mind, but do have a focus on models expressed in the language of mathematical programming.