Performance Metrics and Data Mining for Assessing Schedule Qualities in Paratransit

Abstract

The simple productivity measures and hard constraints used in many paratransit vehicle scheduling software programs do not fully capture the interest of all the stakeholders in a typical paratransit organization (e.g., passengers, drivers, municipal government). As a result, many paratransit agencies still retain a human scheduler to look through all of the schedules to manually pick out impractical, unacceptable runs. (A run is considered one vehicle's schedule for one day.) The goal of this research was to develop a systematic tool that can compute all the relevant performance metrics of a run, predict its overall quality, and identify bad runs automatically. This paper presents a methodology that includes a number of performance metrics reflecting the key interests of the stakeholders (e.g., number of passengers per vehicle per hour, deadheading time, passenger wait time, passenger ride time, and degree of zigzagging) and a data-mining tool to fit the metrics to the ratings provided by experienced schedulers. The encouraging preliminary results suggest that the proposed methodology can be easily extended to and implemented in other paratransit organizations to improve efficiency by effectively detecting poor schedules.

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