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Delay and disruption management in local public transportation via real-time vehicle and crew re-scheduling: a case study

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Abstract

Local public transport companies, especially in large cities, are facing every day the problem of managing delays and small disruptions. Disruption management is a well-established practice in airlines and railways. However, in local public transport the approaches to these problems have followed a different path, mainly focusing on holding and short-turning strategies not directly associated with the driver scheduling. In this paper we consider the case of the management of urban surface lines of Azienda Trasporti Milanese (ATM) of Milan. The main issues are the service regularity as a measure of the quality of service, and the minimization of the operational costs due to changes in the planned driver scheduling. We propose a simulation-based optimization system to cope with delays and small disruptions that can be effectively used in a real-time environment and takes into account both vehicle and driver scheduling. The proposed approach is tested on real data to prove its actual applicability.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to tank Stefano Gualandi, Fabrizio Ronchi and Stefano Scotti for their contribution that greatly improved the quality and completeness of this paper. MAIOR s.r.l. had a fundamental role in the analysis of the problem and in defining the data retrieval tools. We are gratefully indebted with the reviewers for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions. This work has been awarded the “Best OR application 2016”, by the Italian Association of Operations Research (AIRO).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Federico Malucelli

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Emanuele Tresoldi

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  1. Federico Malucelli
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  2. Emanuele Tresoldi
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Correspondence to Emanuele Tresoldi.

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Malucelli, F., Tresoldi, E. Delay and disruption management in local public transportation via real-time vehicle and crew re-scheduling: a case study. Public Transp 11, 1–25 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-019-00196-y

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