Inclusion persons with disabilities to a public transport system: An integrative decision-aiding approach

The topic of integrating persons with disabilities in society is widely studied, especially nowadays, as it is estimated that one billion people are living with disabilities. The research focus of this paper is on the inclusion of disabled persons in the public transport system with an emphasis on their full autonomy. Several models in operational research treat this problem, such as transport on-demand with its varieties, the shortest path problem, even though they are often understood to focus on public transport rather than accessibility to the public network itself. Providing a full service to persons with disabilities in a public transport system is a very long process, which involves many participants. The diversity of the needs of disabled persons and the various interactions between these needs raises the level of complexity behind this process. To explore this problem, we used a decision-aiding approach, which allows to better guide the adaptations required from a transportation system while respecting both the issues at stake for stakeholders in the transportation value chain and the needs of people with disabilities. The goal is to put together all existing transportation models for PWD and offer different decision choices depending on the PWD needs and network characteristics. The main goal is to provide complete service to PWD without interruption with the different governing level decisions. The contributions of this article are multifold. First, we use a multidisciplinary approach to develop a matrix of the different fields of decision. Second, the decision-aiding process proposes a comprehensive analysis, which gives the ability to choose at any time the suitable model for the inclusion of disabled persons. Third, we put forth a scheme of the relationship among existing optimization models, depending on the public network information, more precisely on the concrete accessibility on the public network. Finally, yet importantly, the crucial contribution in this paper is the practical implementation of the decision-aiding process.