Presenting a Method to Modify the Bus Lines in Urban Networks (Case Study: Mashhad)

The most important issue that must be considered at the same time as the development of cities is the design and modification of the public transportation network, and the most important part of which is the design of the bus network. In the city of Mashhad, the creation of metro and BRT lines in the urban network, as well as population growth, have caused fundamental changes in the pattern of urban travel, and therefore it is necessary to modify the network of bus lines. The methods that have been presented to design the bus network have paid less attention to the implementation aspect, and their implementation in real and large-scale networks is very time-consuming. The main goal of this study is to provide an effective and practical method for designing the urban bus network. The method of this study is a combination of heuristic and meta-heuristic methods and is based on genetic algorithm. In order to apply this solution method and the possibility of its implementation for the city of Mashhad, programming in C++ environment was used, which provides the possibility of fast design of the bus network for different purposes and limitations. The output and results of this method were extracted for the city of Mashhad and the optimal bus network was compared with the existing network. The results showed that the demand coverage and other performance indicators in the proposed bus network have a significant improvement compared to the existing network.