Multi-vehicle Mobility Allowance Shuttle Transit (MAST) System: An Analytical Model to Select the Fleet Size and a Scheduling Heuristic

The Mobility Allowance Shuttle Transit (MAST) system is a hybrid transit system in which vehicles are allowed to deviate from a fixed route to serve flexible demand. A mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation for the static scheduling problem of a multi-vehicle MAST system is proposed in this thesis. Based on the MIP formulation, the authors analyzed the impacts of time headways between consecutive transit vehicles on the performance of a two-vehicle MAST system. An analytical framework was then developed to model the performance of both one-vehicle and two-vehicle MAST systems, which can be used to identify the critical demand level at which an increase of the fleet size from one to two vehicles would be appropriate. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to find out the impact of a key modeling parameter, w sub 1, the weight of operations cost on the critical demand. In this research, the authors developed an insertion heuristic for a multi-vehicle MAST system, which has never been addressed in the literature. The proposed heuristic was validated and evaluated by a set of simulations performed at different demand levels and with different control parameters. By comparing its performance versus the optimal solutions, the effectiveness of the heuristic was confirmed. Compared to its single-vehicle counterpart, the multiple-vehicle MAST prevails in terms of rejection rate, passenger waiting time and overall objective function, among other performance indices.