Coordination of Feeder Bus Schedule with Train Service at Integrated Transport Hubs

This paper proposes a schedule coordination method for transfer problems between an urban rail transit service and its feeder bus service. For given train schedules, a novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model is formulated to obtain a coordinated bus schedule with the objective of minimizing the weighted sum of passenger transfer costs and bus operating costs. The queuing process for transfer passengers at the transport hubs, which is attributed to both high transfer volumes and limited bus capacity, is discussed and considered in the coordination problem. The vital decision variable is the terminal departure time of each target feeder bus trip within a certain time period. A hybrid solution method that integrates heuristic and enumerative algorithms was developed to solve the MINLP model, and numerical experiments were conducted for different scenarios. The results indicate that the feeder bus schedule coordinated by the developed model is capable of substantially reducing the transfer waiting time for train passengers with a slight increase in bus operating costs.