Variable traffic conditions cause travel time uncertainty and further lead to time-varying accessibility. Most current studies do not fully consider fluctuations in accessibility and use complicated methods that likely overestimate the level of accessibility and hinder the application of accessibility measures. To address this issue, we utilized large-scale open-source data and proposed an interpretation of the reliability of accessibility concept that incorporates reliability, travel time uncertainty, and a cumulative opportunity measure. We examined the reliability of accessibility to Shenzhen, a major city in China, focusing on transit accessibility and job opportunities. The results demonstrate that the reliability of accessibility displays a bimodal distribution along urban railway lines and can be used to calculate the impact of urban railways in terms of punctuality. The new approach illustrates time-varying characteristics in the form of probabilities and provides further guidance on accessibility for governments.
Due to the congested scenarios of the urban railway system during peak hours, passengers are often left behind on the platform. This paper firstly brings a proposal to capture passengers matching different trains. Secondly, to reduce passengers’ total waiting time, timetable optimisation is put forward based on passengers matching different trains. This is a two-stage model. In the first stage, the aim is to obtain a match between passengers and different trains from the Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) data as well as timetable parameters. In the second stage, the objective is to reduce passengers’ total waiting time, whereby the decision variables are headway and dwelling time. Due to the complexity of our proposed model, an MCMC-GASA (Markov Chain Monte Carlo-Genetic Algorithm Simulated Annealing) hybrid method is designed to solve it. A real-world case of Line 1 in Beijing metro is employed to verify the proposed two-stage model and algorithms. The results show that several improvements have been brought by the newly designed timetable. The number of unique matching passengers increased by 37.7%, and passengers’ total waiting time decreased by 15.5%.
Optimizing centralized dispatching of flexible feeder transit to provide transport and transfer services is important and theoretically challenging for real-world applications. Considering transfer coordination with regular public transit, a multiobjective optimization model that can output an operation plan containing vehicle routes and a timetable for a bus fleet is proposed. By establishing constraints for parameters such as maximum acceptable advance or delay time of transfer, rated passenger capacity, and maximum travel time of a single trip, the proposed model attempts to maximize the successful response ratio, minimize the passengers’ average time costs, and minimize the operating costs of a single passenger. A genetic algorithm was designed to solve the optimal solution, and computational experiments were conducted in a residential area in Beijing. Results reveal that the proposed model and algorithm can be applied in the operation of flexible feeder transit. Moreover, compared with the distributed dispatching method, the value of the optimal objective function in the proposed model was improved by 26%. Although the successful response ratio showed a 29.3% increase and the average passenger time cost showed a small drop, the operating costs per passenger were reduced by 30.7%. The different weight coefficients of the subobjective function and maximum acceptable advance or delay time of transfer could result in different optimal operation plans. Essentially, the optimization procedures for the successful response ratio and the operating costs are in the same direction, whereas the one for the passenger’ cost is in the opposite direction. However, operators should select appropriate values to optimize operation plans.
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