ABSTRACT Rural areas generally have lower and more dispersed demands for travel which cannot sustain conventional public transport services and consequently have a greater number of flexible and demand responsive transport services operating. These services usually operate on a stand-alone basis, are often subsidized and are typically only accessible by certain passenger types or for specific trip purposes. This generally results in uncoordinated and inefficient transport provision overall. The Flexible integrated transport services (FITS) system featured in this paper has been designed to address this problem. FITS can be used as a planning tool to assess potential benefits from relaxing operating constraints (e.g., a service's operating boundaries), which can potentially suggest service redesign. It also includes the capacity to assign subsidy payments on a trip by trip basis to increase cost efficiency whilst meeting a greater proportion of transport needs. The case study in the paper focusses on transport to health in the Aberdeenshire and Morayshire areas of Scotland in the UK. Despite flexible transport operators receiving public funds to meet passenger needs, this is currently being supplemented by public bodies paying large amounts in taxi fares in instances where there is a statutory obligation to provide travel but where no other suitable transport service exists. The results demonstrate the potential substantial savings which could be realized by allowing transport operators to redesign their services by relaxing constraints and by the reassignment of subsidies: resulting in more passenger demands being met and a reduction in public spending on taxi fares.
[1]
Jacques Ferber,et al.
Multi-agent systems - an introduction to distributed artificial intelligence
,
1999
.
[2]
Michael Wooldridge,et al.
Multi-Agent systems: an introduction
,
2001
.
[3]
J. Nelson,et al.
Flexible transport management
,
2016
.
[4]
S. Heikkilä.
Mobility as a Service - A Proposal for Action for the Public Administration, Case Helsinki
,
2014
.
[5]
John D. Nelson,et al.
Barriers to implementing flexible transport services: An international comparison of the experiences in Australia, Europe and USA
,
2012
.
[6]
Juan M. Corchado.
Highlights on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
,
2013,
Communications in Computer and Information Science.
[7]
Cheng Zeng,et al.
Agent-Driven Variable Pricing in Flexible Rural Transport Services
,
2013,
PAAMS.
[8]
J. Datson.
Mobility as a service: exploring the opportunity for mobility as a service in the UK
,
2016
.