Evaluating the Use of Transfers for Improving Demand Responsive Systems Adopting Zoning Strategies

Project Description

An ADA paratransit service uses vans or small buses for demand responsive shared-ride transit. This research investigates the different organizational structures of paratransit services that cover large regions. Some larger systems have outsourced operations to more than one contractor to retain the productivity by focusing on shorter trips within a denser area.

Researchers compared the productivity and service quality of coordinated decentralized paratransit systems with independent decentralized and centralized strategies. Then researchers developed an insertion-based heuristic method to compare the performance of different operational designs by a large scale system.

Researchers concluded that the zoning with transfer method proved to be a productive organizational structure. Although the exact level of benefit will vary according to the different demand types and different operational standards, this simulation methodology is easily and quickly adaptable to any large-scale paratransit system. Future work should include combining the search of optimal transfer locations or the number of transfer locations to improve the performance of our proposed transfer system.

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Link: Final Report

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