Modeling and design of integrated transit systems with strategic passenger behavior

Abstract

Experimental evidence shows that the uncertainty in travel time causes transit passengers to employ "strategies" when traveling between various origin-destination pairs. Such strategic behavior helps passengers adapt to the varying traffic conditions in the network. The current dissertation develops modeling frameworks to predict strategic passenger behavior in stochastic and time-dependent (STD) transit networks and use it for the design and long-term planning of integrated transit systems. It makes four principal contributions. First, it develops routing algorithms to describe the strategic behavior of transit and park-and-ride passengers using online information about road congestion and bus arrival at stops when traveling in a STD network. Second, to predict the average passenger flow on each link of the network, it develops schedule-based transit assignment models with online information for uncapacitated and capacitated transit networks. Third, it proposes an optimization model to design transit routes' alignment and corresponding frequencies incorporating the strategic passenger behavior. Fourth, it develops an optimization model to design an integrated Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) and transit systems to decide which transit routes to operate, the frequency of operating transit routes, and the MoD fleet size required to address the transit first-mile last-mile problem. Efficient algorithms are devised to solve the proposed models. Numerical experiments show that the park-and-ride passengers commuting from suburban regions to Downtown Minneapolis can save around 36 hours/year by employing strategic routing. The transit assignment results show complex passenger behavior as passengers consider alternative routes to avoid missing transfers and denied boarding due to congestion. Finally, the design results show a significant improvement in the congestion in the city center of the City of Sioux Falls with the introduction of the integrated system.