A Survey on Demand-Responsive Transportation for Rural and Interurban Mobility

Rural areas have been marginalized when it comes to flexible, quality transportation research. This review article brings together papers that discuss, analyze, model, or experiment with demand-responsive transportation systems applied to rural settlements and interurban transportation, discussing their general feasibility as well as the most successful configurations. For that, demand-responsive transportation is characterized and the techniques used for modeling and optimization are described. Then, a classification of the relevant publications is presented, splitting the contributions into analytical and experimental works. The results of the classification lead to a discussion that states open issues within the topic: replacement of public transportation with demand-responsive solutions, disconnection between theoretical and experimental works, user-centered design and its impact on adoption rate, and a lack of innovation regarding artificial intelligence implementation on the proposed systems.