Shuttle Planning for Link Closures in Urban Public Transport Networks

Urban Public Transport Networks regularly close links in their network for maintenance. These planned closures have significant effect on the service provided to passengers. In practice, the effects of closures are mitigated by replacing the link with a shuttle service. This paper addresses the problem of location and frequency design of shuttle lines under budget constraints. We present a new linear mixed-integer formulation for this problem that preserves the binary decision of opening a line while allowing for flexible capacity assignment. The model includes a dynamic passenger assignment component. This model is applied to a shuttle design problem based on a real world case study with the MBTA network of Boston, USA. Our results show that additional shuttles routes can reduce delay in comparison to the standard practice in the industry. The results are robust under different assumptions of passenger route choice behaviour. Furthermore the results show that the proposed formulation, coupled with a pre-processing step, is significantly faster than an alternative formulation.

• Registration to Remy Spliet, spliet@ese.eur.nl is required for availability of lunch.

This event is organised by the Econometric Institute.
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