Inter-city bus scheduling with central city location and trip selection

Abstract

This study considers a real-life inter-city bus scheduling problem that incorporates central city locations and trip selection sub-problems. We seek to determine the size of the bus fleet, the cities to be served, the central cities, and the routes and schedules of buses in the fleet. For this purpose, we developed a number of investment scenarios, and for each scenario, we determined possible trip alternatives between cities and resulting expected profits. We then developed an integer linear programming model and a decomposition-based heuristic, which attempt to solve the problem with the objective of profit maximization. Finally, we compare the performance of both solution approaches in terms of the solution quality and computation time for each of the scenarios. The results show that both methods are capable of achieving satisfactory performance for small and medium-size instances, whereas the heuristic outperforms the exact method significantly on large instances. c INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING