Optimization Model for Town–Village Bus Service Frequency Design

In this study, a non-linear optimization model involving two objectives, i.e. the efficiency of the total travel time and the rate of return on an investment of public transportation companies, was proposed to dispatch buses on the town-village bus route from the perspective of the passengers and the operators. In addition, the law of gravitation was used to analyze the differences of passenger volumes owing to the different bus service frequency. Genetic algorithms were also introduced to solve the optimization model. Finally, the proposed methodology was applied to a town-village bus route in the city of Changzhou, China. The results showed that the model was well validated in terms of reliability and robustness, and could be practically used for the analysis and design of the town-village bus service frequency. Sensitivity analyses were also conducted to investigate the effects of weighting values on the performance of the proposed method.