Optimization problems in bus route network design

Abstract

Ride-sharing has been one of the emerging solutions to the ever-increasing problem of congestion and air pollution in cities. However, the effectiveness of ride-sharing in reducing private vehicles is contingent on its e ciency while maintaining economic viability from the perspective of both the operator and the passenger. This work proposes a ride-sharing framework that jointly takes into account the quality of sharing as well as the operator revenue while xing the consumer cost. It formulates a weighted graph coloring optimization problem that has the exibility to incorporate various factors that promote ride-sharing efficiency while maximizing the operator revenue. Application of the method on two separate datasets from two di parent geographies, Bangalore, India and New York City, USA provides promising results vis-a-vis the state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed framework has the potential to increase the occupancy of vehicles, enable sharing of bigger vehicles while assigning naturally shared rides and at the same time, the framework can easily be scaled to cater to dynamic ride-sharing requests without much modi cation. Further, when compared to there being no ride-sharing, on average, the percentage of riders sharing rides and percentage of vehicles being shared is more than 85% and 75% respectively with over 60% reduction in the number of vehicles being used. The key the insight obtained from this work is that incorporating the quality and efficiency of shared rides has the potential to enhance operator revenue as well.