Flexible Bus Routes Design in Surburban Subway Radiation Area

This paper proposes a method for flexible bus on how to choose flexible bus stations and design bus routes in the area suburban subway stations served. The paper mainly focuses on bus station selection, bus routes generation and flexible transit operation. Firstly, principles are proposed for the selection of flexible bus stations based on the deep mining of navigation data and points of interest (POI). Secondly, the problem of flexible bus route design is transformed into an optimization problem. According to the selected stations and the reservation information, a heuristic function optimization model is constructed which aims at minimizing the weighted sum of the bus company’s operating cost and passenger waiting time cost, and the improved ant colony algorithm is used to solve the model. Thirdly, a case study is applied to design the flexible transit system, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.