Terminal-based zonal bus: A novel flexible transit system design and implementation

The pursuit of individual mobilities expedites the development of demand-responsive systems, while the balance between service flexibilities and operational cost is becoming particularly important. This paper proposes a method for operating a novel demand-responsive bus system termed terminal-based zonal bus (TZB). It is a flexible system with vehicles executing a terminal-based zone routing scheme in specified service zones. The terminal-based routing scheme intends to generate TZB lines, and each line is operated by one vehicle that travels along a series of terminal stations arranged in order and serves enroute passenger requests between any two consecutive terminal stations. As instant response is the main trait of demand-responsive systems, TZB is able to address instance response by incorporating reserve capacity, which is employed to indicate the vehicle responsive ability of new real-time requests. Further, a tailored heuristic algorithm is designed to solve the proposed model, which simultaneously incorporates several practical restrictions, including the capability of adopting real-time requests, terminal stations' fleet-size constraints, time window constraints, and vehicle capacity. Computational experiments are conducted based upon the newly developed modern city Xiong An, China which confirm that the proposed method is capable of obtaining high-quality solutions efficiently, and TZB can provide flexible service at a relatively low operational cost.