A Survey-based Approach for Selecting the Stations and Links for a Rapid Transit Network

In this work we present the first stage of a two-stage approach for designing rapid transit networks, where the stations and links to be constructed are selected by solving an integer linear optimization model that maximizes an estimation of the number of trips through the rapid transit network. It is based on the first stage of another approach that we described elsewhere. Instead of considering a static origin-destination matrix, we propose a novel way of computing the expected number of trips by making use of the results from a survey amongst the potential users of the rapid transit network. We also report some computational experiments on several randomly generated instances. In the second stage of the approach, a set of lines is generated for the rapid transit network.