Compatibility-Based Approach for Routing and Scheduling the Demand Responsive Connector

This study concentrates on the routing and scheduling problem of Demand Responsive Connector to build feeder plans for people traveling from and to transit hub. An in-depth analysis on the characteristics of feeder services was implemented to inspire the compatibility-based algorithm design. With the goal of reducing operating cost and passenger inconvenience, the proposed algorithm took several factors critical to the real-word operation into consideration, such as double time window assurance (the time constraints at the beginning and end of passenger travels), the flexibility of feeder plans, and the number of vehicles. Our method was validated on numerical instances of 400, 600, 800 and 1000 passengers. Simulation results show that the compatibility-based algorithm can effectively reduce the number of vehicles with acceptable increase of passengers’ inconvenience, and can improve the algorithm efficiency considerably. In addition, the setting of flexible time window of shutter plan can hold some elasticity for feeder services. Sensitivity analysis was conducted to help service providers evaluate the trade-off between the operation cost and level of service.