Data-Driven Flexible Vehicle Scheduling and Route Optimization

The flexible transit service reflects a trend of demand on the flexibility and convenience in urban public transport systems, within which the vehicle scheduling and passenger insertion are two challenging issues. Especially, finding the optimal solution for a flexible transit system can be viewed as an extension of the traveling salesman problem which is NP-complete. Yet most of the existing research mainly focuses on one aspect, i.e. route planning, stop selection or vehicle scheduling, where a combined integration and optimization of the whole system is largely neglected. In this paper, we propose a data-driven flexible transit system that integrates the origin-destination insertion algorithm and the milp-based (mixed-integer linear programming) scheduling scheme. Specifically, stops are mined from the historical datasets and some stops act as $backbone$ stops that should be visited by the vehicles; and a heuristic backbone-based origin-destination insertion algorithm is proposed to schedule the routing path of vehicles, where the time loss caused by the optimal insertion positions is calculated for the vehicles to decide whether to accept the requests or not when constructing a path for the flexible routes. Moreover, a vehicle scheduling model based on milp is proposed to minimise the gap between the passenger flow and available seats. The proposed flexible transit systems are simulated in real-world taxi datasets, and experimental results show that the proposed flexible transit system can effectively increase the delivery ratio and decrease the passengers’ waiting time compared with existing methods.