Bus Network Modification Problem: A New Approach to Bus Network Design

Most previous research on Bus Network Design, have considered the complete redesign of the network. This approach has shown to be difficult to implement in realistic applications. Therefore, in this paper, a new approach has been proposed to design bus transit systems. Instead of completely redesigning a bus network, a modification approach is proposed. This is done though the use of similarity indexes, which estimate the amount of similarity between the proposed and the base network. a goal programming approach has been used in this paper, due to the multi-objective nature of the problem. The model is solved using Genetic Algorithm for two different case studies: A benchmark network proposed by Mandle and a city in Iran (Kashan). The results have shown satisfactory outcomes of the model.