Mobile Phone Data in Urban Customized Bus: A Network-based Hierarchical Location Selection Method with an Application to System Layout Design in the Urban Agglomeration

Employment is one of the essential socioeconomic connections in urban agglomeration. However, both the demand and the supply of transjurisdictional public transport service are unevenly distributed in such area. Customized bus has a high potential of serving transjurisdictional and long-distance commuting demand. This study proposes a network-based layout design method to generate hierarchical service scopes and stations for customized bus system. First, the home and the workplace of residents are identified using mobile phone data, to construct a jobs-housing relationship network. Then, an iterative algorithm based on network community detection and density-based spatial clustering is applied to the jobs-housing relationship network to hierarchically segment the urban agglomeration area into communities. Three methods are proposed for location selection of customized bus stations. A case study is conducted using the mobile phone dataset from nine cities in the Yangtze River Urban Agglomeration in China. A four-level hierarchical customized bus system layout is generated and both the spatial properties and network properties of service scopes are analyzed. The proposed three methods of customized bus station location selection are compared based on the average travel distance and the rationality of the resulted customized bus station location.