The Design of Feeder Network Rail Line and Determine Frequency Using a Heuristic Method

The main role of feeder in urban networks is to increase the coverage of rapid public transportation systems such as subway and bus rapid transit. The high complexity of the exact methods of designing feeder networks motivates researchers to apply heuristic and meta-heuristic methods to find approximate solution of feeder network design. This paper presents an innovative approach to design of feeder network for a subway line using a two-stage heuristic method. The proposed method has been applied in Sioux Falls as a test network which is often used in transit network design. According to the proposed method, at the first stage, a number of primary routes are generated as initial solutions; then these routes are screened according to a set of parameters such as the ratio of the covered demand to travel time, maximum and minimum limit for feeder network length. At second stage, frequency restrictions, the number of routes and covered percentage have been used to select final routes. The proposed method was used in the test network Sioux Falls that improved the demand coverage for public transport system. The demand coverage with the limit of 3 and 4 lines for feeder network are equal to 65.22 and 78.42 percent, respectively.