A Comparative Analysis of Heuristic Methods for Facility Location and Allocation of Buses to Facilities in Urban Road Transportation Systems

Abstract

The city buses operating in the Urban Road Transportation Systems (URTS) cover various non-revenue generating distances without carrying passengers. One such distance travelled from a facility in the early morning to starting point of first trip and ending point of last trip back to the facility in the late evening is the 'dead kilometers or mileage' (DK). Since the mileage per unit of the fuel varies, minimizing DK cost (DKC) associated with allocation of city buses to facility (ACBF) problem is an ideal objective than minimizing DK. This DKC is directly affected by the location of the facilities and assignment of each of the buses to a specific facility. Due to continuous growth of any metro-city and commuters of citybuses, the number of city-buses need to be increased. Further, due to environmental and logistic reasons, a few existing facilities need to be closed. Due to this there is a need to open new facilities. For closing the existing facility(s), a salvage cost is incurred and for opening new facility(s), fixed cost is incurred. So, in any URTS, there is facility location (FL) problem for opening and/or closing facility(s).Further, FL and ACBF problems are inseparable as DKC is the common cost affecting the decisions associated with each of these decision problems. So, this study considers the integrated decision problem on FL and ACBF (FL-ACBF). Accordingly, the focus of this research is to (a) identify the best-known heuristics from literature for minimizing simultaneously fixed cost, salvage cost, and DKC for FL-ACBF; and (b) evaluate empirically the performance of identified heuristics for selecting efficient heuristic(s).