A disjunctive program formulation to generate regular public transit timetables adhering to prioritized planning requirements

Funding information National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Numbers: I/UCRC IIP-1338922, AIR IIP-1237818, III-Large IIS-1213026, MRI CNS-1532061, MRI CNS-1429345, MRI CNS-0821345, MRI CNS-1126619, MRI CNS-0959985, RAPID CNS-1507611; U.S. DOT Grant, Grant/Award Number: ARI73 Abstract Timetable regularity, that is, equability of headways, is an important measure for service quality in high frequency public transit systems, assuring an evenly distributed passenger load as well as improving product attractiveness. However, to be feasible during daily operation a timetable may also have to adhere to other planning requirements, such as departure time coordination with other service providers or deliberately short headways to reduce the passenger load of follow-up vehicles. In this article, a disjunctive program formulation combining aspects of two previous optimization models is proposed, to generate regular public transit timetables adhering to planning requirements. The modeled requirements not only allow for the consideration of feasibility constraints from daily operations, but also for the consideration of simultaneous departures for transfer connections, an objective traditionally opposed to regularity. To show its applicability the approach is applied to two models of artificial transit networks as well as to models of the public transit network of Cologne, Germany. The results show that the proposed formulation can be used to generate timetables for network instances of realistic size in acceptable time. For networks consisting of multiple connected components it is shown that a decomposition approach can significantly reduce run times.