A paratransit-inspired evolutionary process for public transit network design

Public transport companies should run sustainable transit lines and demand oriented services. This paper presents an evolutionary model for the design of demand responsive routes and transport networks. The approach adopts the survival of the fittest principle from competitive developing world paratransit systems with respect to vehicles, market actor characteristics, route patterns and route functions. The model is integrated into a microscopic multi-agent simulation framework, and successfully applied to a naive and a complex scenario. The scenarios include the interaction of paratransit services with conventional public transport. With limited resources paratransit services compete and cooperate with each other to find sustainable routes, which compete or complement existing public transport lines. Besides providing a starting point for paratransit modeling of a region, the approach can also be used to identify areas with insufficient supply of public transport.

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