Optimal Design for Urban Mass Transit Network Based on Evolutionary Algorithms

Optimal design for urban mass transit network is the precondition and basis to establish an effective public transportation system. Transit network optimization and headway optimization are two of the most important issues to be dealt with. In this paper, a transit network optimization model is firstly proposed to maximize the nonstop passenger flow. Moreover, this paper puts forwards the optimization model of headways for all the transit routes in the optimized network. Since all the two models can be boiled down to the NP-hard problem, two kinds of evolutionary algorithms, i.e., ant colony algorithm and improved genetic algorithm are introduced to solve the problems respectively. Finally, a case study in a typical city is introduced to explain the validity of the proposed methods.