Optimizing a Bus Bridging Strategy Considering Efficiency and Equity

Efficient bus bridging strategy during metro disruptions is needed to evacuate passengers to reduce the social and economic loss. We propose a two-stage model to assign each bus a bridging plan that lists the stations to visit in sequence since it is dispatched from the depot. Stage I is to minimize the evacuation time from the view of managers, while stage II is to reduce the passenger delay from the view of passengers. Two objectives, reflecting efficiency and equity respectively, are considered in stage II. Since the deficiency of existing commercial software in solving stage II, a modified Tabu Search (TS) algorithm is developed to improve the computation speed. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the practicability of the algorithm and the model. Also, we discuss the trade-off between efficiency and equity by comparing the results: considering efficiency could lead to polarized results, while considering equity provides a more balanced service at the cost of increasing the delay for the whole system. Copyright © 2019 by Science Press.