A Multi-Objective Programming Approach to Design Feeder Bus Route for High-Speed Rail Stations

The quality of route design can greatly affect the operational efficiency of feeder bus service for high-speed rail stations. A bi-objective optimization formulation is established to consider the trade-off between two conflicting optimization objectives, namely maximizing the travel demand that can be served and minimizing the feeder bus route length. The Pareto optimal solutions of the discrete mathematical formulation are generated by the exact epsilon-constraint method. We test the proposed approach with a numerical example on an actual size scale. The results indicate that the computational efficiency of the solution approach is encouraging, and a series of route design plans and location stop plans are generated simultaneously in a short time. A numerical example also shows that as the passengers' maximum acceptable walking distance increases, more travel demand can be served when the route length does not change much. Benefits brought by increasing feeder bus route length are analyzed and the robustness of obtained solutions is verified. The comparison of our approach and an existing approach is also presented to demonstrate that our approach can generate better solutions.