Issue 115 of 2019 of Yuyuan Management Forum (Total No. 566)
Theme: Optimal Sectional Fare and Frequency Settings for Transit Networks with Elastic Demand
Presenter: Situ Huiyuan, Professor, Civil Engineering Department, The University of Hong Kong, Deputy Director of the Transport Research Institute
Holder: Li Zhichun, Professor, Department of Management Science and Information Management, School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Time: October 18, 2019 (Friday) 14:30-16:00
Location: School of Management Classroom 219
About the presenter:
Dr. Wai Yuen Szeto is a Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at The University of Hong Kong, and the Deputy Director of the Institute of Transport Studies at that university. He is a Top 1 % Scholar 2015-2018 (according to Clarivate Analytics' Essential Science Indicators). His current h-index is 41 (Google scholars). He is an author of over 135 refereed journal papers, with two papers in Operations Research and 30 papers in Transportation Research Part B. His publications have been cited over 5480 times (Google scholars). The publications are related to public bikes, dynamic traffic assignment, transport network design, public transport, network reliability, transport big data, taxi, game theoretic approaches to transport and logistic problems, modeling land use, transport and environment interaction, and sustainable transport. He received the World Conference on Transport Research Prize in 2001, the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies Outstanding Paper Award in 2003, the best paper award of The 10th International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science in 2018, and the Outstanding Paper Award of the 2018 China Urban Transportation Planning Annual Meeting. He also received Certificate of Excellence in Reviewing from Transportation Research Part B in 2013 and Transportation Research Part C in 2013 and 2016. Currently, he is an Editor of Transportmetrica B, an Associate Editor of Transportation Research Part D, Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, Transportmetrica A, Travel Behaviour and Society, an Area Editor of Networks and Spatial Economics, and an Editorial Board Member of Transportation Research Part C and E, and International Journal of Sustainable Transportation.
Brief introduction:
Sectional fares have been used in transit services in practice but are rarely examined analytically and compared with flat and distance-based fares, especially under the considerations of path choice, elastic demand, service frequency, and profitability. This paper proposes a bilevel programming model to jointly determine the fare and frequency setting to maximize transit operator's profit. The preceding three fare structures can be incorporated into the bilevel model. To consider the path choice and elastic demand in the bilevel model, the existing approach-based stochastic user equilibrium transit assignment model for the fixed demand was extended to the elastic demand case and the resultant model was used in the lower level model. To solve the bilevel model, the sensitivity-based descent search method that takes into account the approach-based formulation for the elastic demand transit assignment is proposed, in which the approach-based formulation was solved by the cost-averaging self-regulated averaging method. Numerical studies and mathematical analyses were performed to examine the model properties and compare the three fare structures. The result of the Tin Shui Wai network instance is also provided to illustrate the performance of the solution method.
