Abstract

The objective of any transit system is to provide better level of service to its passengers. One of the good measures of level of service is the waiting time of passengers during their journey and for better level of service the waiting time should be minimized. The minimization of waiting time can be done by through proper scheduling of the bus transit system. Waiting time consists of overall transfer time (TT) of passengers transferring between different routes and the initial waiting time (IWT) of the passengers waiting to board a bus at their point of origin. A good schedule should minimize both the overall transfer time of passengers and the initial waiting time of the passengers, in this study; a mathematical programming (MP) formulation of the scheduling problem at one transfer station is presented. The MP problem in large and non-linear in terms of the decision variables which are real as well as integers. Because of large number of decision variables it is difficult to solve the problem by using traditional methods. Hence, Genetic algorithms (GAs) - search and optimization methods based on natural genetics and selection - were used to solve the problem. Function based declarations and coding of variables in GAs allow an efficient variables in GAs allow an efficient reformulation of the original problem. Reformulation of the original problem. The modified problem is computationally much simpler than the original problem. The results obtained from a number from a number of test problems show that the GAs are able to find optimal schedules with minimal computational requirements.