Directionality‐centric bus transit network segmentation for on‐demand public transit

The recent growth in real‐time, high‐capacity ride‐sharing has made on‐demand public transit (ODPT) a reality. ODPT systems serving passengers using a vehicle fleet that operates with flexible routes, strive to minimise fleet travel distance. Heuristic routing algorithms have been integrated in ODPT systems in order to improve responsiveness. However, route computation time in such algorithms depends on problem complexity and hence increases for large scale problems. Thus, network segmentation techniques that exploit parallel computing have been proposed in order to reduce route computation time. Even though computation time can be reduced using segmentation in existing techniques, it comes at the cost of degradation of route quality due to static demarcation of boundaries and disregarding real road network distances. Thus, this work proposes, a directionality‐centric bus transit network segmentation technique that exploits parallel computation capable of computing routes in near real‐time while providing high scalability. Additionally, a dynamic fleet allocation algorithm that exploits proximity and flexibility to minimise vehicle detours while maximising fleet utilisation is proposed. Experimental evaluations on a real road network confirm that the proposed method achieves notable speed‐up in flexible route computation without compromising route quality compared to a widely used unsupervised learning technique.