Heuristic Bus Network Design Method Using Graph Theory

Urban bus transportation is one of the common public transportation modes, which has a significant position among all other modes. Any attempt in order to increase the effectiveness and desirability of this mode has a positive influence on the urban trips. Bus network design due to its considerable influence on the performance of this mode is of great importance. And various approaches have been proposed in this context, which have different advantages and disadvantages. Reaching the optimal network in the shortest possible time, considering the parameters which are in conflict with each other most of the time, is the main reason of the complexity of bus network design problem, and makes constraints for the designers. The present paper proposes a heuristic approach for solving bus network design, which is based on graph theory. The proposed methodology designs bus network in two steps of route generating and route selection. For the evaluation purpose, this method compared to other heuristic methods. The results showed that the proposed method outperforms the other existing heuristic network design methods