Research On Demand Responsive Rural Customized Bus Route Operations

China’s rural areas are vast,the population is large and scattered,based on this feature,passenger transport presents the distribution of scattered,low density of weak passenger flow characteristics.With the increasing number of private car ownership in rural areas,traditional passenger transport in rural or less dense areas,often occur in the vehicle capacity is low or even empty,passengers in rural areas are often faced with low punctuality of public transport,and long waiting time,while the cost of operating companies also remains high.With the indepth study of travel demand in low-density areas at home and abroad,a new type of public transport operation mode-demand responsive customized public transport has emerged.This flexible operation mode can solve the problem of "travel difficulty" in rural areas with scattered passenger flows and long distances to a certain extent.Therefore,this paper summarizes the core features of demand responsive customized bus,analyzes various factors that affect passengers’ choice of customized bus travel in rural areas,and studies reasonable and efficient customized bus route planning methods with the goal of reducing costs for both operating companies and passengers,which has important theoretical and practical significance.Firstly,this paper summarized the development status of related research at home and abroad,and analyzed the characteristics of rural passenger flow and demand-responsive customized bus in detail,and compared demand-responsive customized bus with various conventional transportation modes to conclude the advantages and customization process of demand-responsive customized bus.Secondly,this paper issued a combination of stated preference(SP)and revealed preference(RP)questionnaire through a combination of online + offline,collected the current problems of passenger shuttles in rural areas,analyzed the willingness of customized bus travel in rural areas,and used gray correlation to study the factors affecting residents’ choice of customized bus travel in rural areas,so as to provide a practical basis for opening customized bus travel services in rural areas.Thirdly,this paper formulated a static and dynamic stage vehicle path model with the optimization objective of minimizing the cost for both operating companies and passengers,taking into account relevant constraints such as passenger time windows,different vehicle types,rated passenger capacity and the running time of the line;by analyzing and comparing common vehicle path algorithms,this paper proposed a hybrid bat-adaptive particle swarm(BA-APSO)algorithm.The inertia weight in the particle velocity was introduced into the velocity calculation formula of the bat algorithm(BA),and the optimal solution selection mode of BA was improved by using the particle adaptive change mode to obtain better target values for faster convergence and reduced search time.Finally,Finally,the effectiveness of the BA-APSO hybrid algorithm on the optimization model is verified with the actual road network in some townships of Jing’an County,Jiangxi Province,and the resulting optimal solution is 2079.4 yuan,which is 344.7 yuan and 531.8 yuan less than the target values of the BA and APSO algorithms,respectively.Compared with conventional buses,demand-responsive customized buses used different types of vehicles to increase the average passenger load and reduced the total distance traveled by 336.1 km,and proposed countermeasures and suggestions for operating customized buses in rural areas from four aspects: government,industry authorities,bus operators and passengers.The results show that the optimization model and hybrid algorithm designed in this paper can provide theoretical references for opening demand-responsive customized bus route operation schemes in rural areas.