Abstract

Operators of public transport always try to make their service as attractive as possible, to as many persons as possible and in a so cost effective way as possible. One way to make the service more attractive, especially to elderly and disabled, is to offer door-to-door transportation. The cost for the local authorities to provide this service is very high and increases every year. To better serve the needs of the population and to reduce the cost for transportation of elderly and disabled, public transportation systems are evolving towards more flexible solutions. One such flexible solution is a demand responsive service integrated with a fixed route service, together giving a form of flexible public transport system. The demand responsive service can in such a system be used to carry passengers from their origin to a transfer location to the fixed route network, and/or from the fixed route network to their destination. This thesis concerns the development of a framework for evaluation and design of such an integrated public transport service. The framework includes a geographic information system, optimization tools and simulation tools. This framework describes how these tools can be used in combination to aid the operators in the planning process of an integrated service. The thesis also presents simulations made in order to find guidelines of how an integrated service should be designed. The guidelines are intended to help operators of public transport to implement integrated services and are found by evaluating the effects on availability, travel time, cost and other service indicators for variations in the design and structure of the service. In a planning system for an integrated public transport service, individual journeys must in some way be scheduled. For this reason the thesis also presents an exact optimization model of how journeys should be scheduled in this kind of service. "p"Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC- 2006:38