A Novel Model for Designing a Demand-Responsive Connector (DRC) Transit System With Consideration of Users' Preferred Time Windows

This article presents a mathematical model to design a demand-responsive connector (DRC) bus operational network for improving the service quality and accessibility of public transportation systems. The proposed model features an integrated framework that simultaneously guides passengers to reach their nearest bus stops and routes buses to transport passengers at selected bus stops to connected stations of major transit systems. Passengers’ preferred time for pick up is fully considered in the model. For this purpose, this study proposes a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programing model to effectively capture the interactions between users with their predefined service time windows and DRC bus network. This study further develops a three-stage heuristic to yield suboptimal solutions to the model in a reasonable time. Case study results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.