Designing a Flexible Feeder Transit System Serving Irregularly Shaped and Gated Communities: Determining Service Area and Feeder Route Planning

This paper presents a mathematical model to design the appropriate service area and routing plans for a flexible feeder transit system serving irregularly shaped and gated communities. Given the fleet size and travel times between demand collection nodes, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to optimize the service area and transit route planning concurrently. The proposed model features a two-level structure with an upper level to maximize the number of served passengers by the feeder transit system and a lower level to minimize the operational cost for transit operators. This paper further presents a heuristic approach to yield acceptable solutions to the model in a reasonable amount of time. Case study results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model as well as the heuristic solution approach.