A Real-Time Scheduling Method for a Variable-Route Bus in a Community

Real-time vehicle scheduling that can arrange routes variably for the bus within a community in response to new customers’ requests is beneficial to flexible routing for its efficiency in quick response and saving cost especially when the density of customer requests is low. In this paper, a real-time scheduling method for assigning immediate request, which allows variable route, is proposed. A multi-objective model is built for the real-time scheduling problem considering the cost, and passengers on bus and waiting at stops. A two-phase quick response approach and a local optimization method is proposed, which makes trade off between the computation time and the solution quality. A numerical experiment based on the real-world case has been designed to test the effectiveness of the proposed method. Comparison on the variable-route method and the fixed-route approach demonstrates the potential savings and diminishing of waiting time can be obtained through the proposed approach. The method proposed also has potential application for handling real-time vehicle routing in schools, tourist places, and manufactories logistics.