Disruption Response Planning for an Urban Mass Rapid Transit Network

1 Given many cities’ growing dependence on public rail transport, simple network disruptions can 2 lead to widespread confusion and significant productivity loss to the society. Therefore, a sys3 tematic approach to develop efficient disruption response and minimize the negative impacts is 4 required. In this paper, we develop a planning procedure to supplement a degraded urban mass 5 rapid transit network through intelligent introduction of shuttle bus services in the disrupted area. 6 The proposed method includes two important mechanisms, namely (1) using column generation 7 to identify all beneficial bus routes, including those which might not be intuitively found, and (2) 8 using a path-based multi-commodity flow formulation to select the best among these candidate bus 9 routes. Finally, the method is applied to two disruption case studies defined using real-world data; 10 the corresponding results confirmed the practicality of the proposed approach: (1) the procedure 11 can be carried out efficiently, (2) introducing bus routes to the naive bridging services can eas12 ily yield significant improvement on commuters’ travel delay, (3) the distribution of commuters’ 13 travel delay is improved considerably with an optimized response, and (4) many realistic operating 14 constraints can be handled in planning process. 15