Designing a multimodal feeder network by covering stops with different modes

摘要

Mass rapid transit requires a high demand to function economically. It is necessary to provide complementary services, such as buses and vans, to increase the required demand. This results in the possibility of providing high performance transit to a wider area. One of the suggested methods is to establish an integrated system of a feeder network. Using such systems provide not only sufficient demand for the main networks but also the possibility of an integrated public transportation system that extends to the entire city. In this paper, we have proposed a method for designing feeder networks that gives multimodal services at each stop simultaneously by assigning the demand to different modes. The demand assignment is based on optimum use of fleet rather than desirability functions. The objective is to minimize the costs of the users, operators, and society. Furthermore, as multimodal network designing is a complex problem, a metaheuristic approach, ant colony optimization, is used. For illustrating and comparing the results, a real example in Mashhad, Iran, is run through 16 different scenarios: The scenarios were designed with different unit costs, and the results have been compared with the latest study. In all of the scenarios, the network costs are lower than those in other methods.