Open AccessFixed‐route taxi system: route network design and fleet size minimization problems
Author(s) -
Babaei Mohsen,
Schmöcker JanDirk,
Khademi Navid,
Ghaffari AhmadReza,
Naderan Ali
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of advanced transportation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.577
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 2042-3195
pISSN - 0197-6729
DOI - 10.1002/atr.1400
Subject(s) - taxis , service (business) , heuristic , transport engineering , computer science , operations research , minification , transfer (computing) , linear programming , total cost , travel time , flow network , fleet management , public transport , mathematical optimization , engineering , mathematics , business , accounting , algorithm , marketing , artificial intelligence , parallel computing , programming language
Summary This paper introduces the taxi route network design problem (TXRNDP) for a fixed‐route taxi service operating in Iran and, in similar form, in various other developing countries. The service operates fairly similar to regular transit services in that vehicles are only permitted to follow a certain predetermined route on the network. The service is provided with small size vehicles and main features are that vehicles only depart if full and that there are no intermediate boarding stops. In Iran the service attracts a high modal share but requires better coordination which is the main motivation for the present study. We develop a mathematical programming model to minimize the total travel time experienced by passengers while constraining the number of taxi lines, the trip transfer ratio and the length of taxi lines. A number of assumptions are introduced in order to allow finding an exact rather than heuristic solution. We further develop a linear programming solution to minimize the number of taxis required to serve the previously found fixed‐route taxi network. Results of a case study with the city of Zanjan, Iran, illustrate the resulting taxi flows and suggest the capability of the proposed model to reduce the total travel time, the total waiting time and the number of taxi lines compared to the current taxi operation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.