TY - JOUR
T1 - The airport shuttle bus scheduling problem
AU - Öner, Nihat
AU - Gultekin, Hakan
AU - Koç, Çağrı
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding provided by the Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit of Social Sciences University of Ankara under grant SBF-2019-190.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - This paper introduces the airport shuttle bus scheduling problem (ASBSP) as a new practical scheduling variant. In this problem, a number of identical vehicles that have a specific number of available seats provides transfer service between the airport and the city centre. After making a transfer in one direction, the vehicle can either make a new transfer in the opposite direction depending on the availability and the schedule of the passengers or make an empty return to make a new transfer in the same direction. The vehicles can wait in either location until their next transfer. The passengers have certain time windows for the transfer in relation to their flight times and operational rules to satisfy customer satisfaction. This is a profit-seeking service where transfer requests can also be rejected. The ASBSP aims to prepare a daily schedule for the available vehicles and to assign passengers to these vehicles with the objective of maximising the total profit. This paper presents two alternative mixed integer programming formulations and proposes two valid inequalities to get better bounds. Furthermore, it develops a hybrid metaheuristic that integrates multi-start, simulated annealing and large neighbourhood search for its solution. Extensive computational experiments on real-life benchmark instances have been made to test the performances of the formulations and the hybrid metaheuristic. Furthermore, the impacts of several problem parameters including the number of vehicles, vehicle capacity, transfer fee, transportation time and allowable passenger waiting times on the problem complexity and results have been investigated.
AB - This paper introduces the airport shuttle bus scheduling problem (ASBSP) as a new practical scheduling variant. In this problem, a number of identical vehicles that have a specific number of available seats provides transfer service between the airport and the city centre. After making a transfer in one direction, the vehicle can either make a new transfer in the opposite direction depending on the availability and the schedule of the passengers or make an empty return to make a new transfer in the same direction. The vehicles can wait in either location until their next transfer. The passengers have certain time windows for the transfer in relation to their flight times and operational rules to satisfy customer satisfaction. This is a profit-seeking service where transfer requests can also be rejected. The ASBSP aims to prepare a daily schedule for the available vehicles and to assign passengers to these vehicles with the objective of maximising the total profit. This paper presents two alternative mixed integer programming formulations and proposes two valid inequalities to get better bounds. Furthermore, it develops a hybrid metaheuristic that integrates multi-start, simulated annealing and large neighbourhood search for its solution. Extensive computational experiments on real-life benchmark instances have been made to test the performances of the formulations and the hybrid metaheuristic. Furthermore, the impacts of several problem parameters including the number of vehicles, vehicle capacity, transfer fee, transportation time and allowable passenger waiting times on the problem complexity and results have been investigated.
KW - Airport shuttle bus service
KW - hybrid metaheuristic
KW - scheduling
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096158645&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85096158645&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/00207543.2020.1841317
DO - 10.1080/00207543.2020.1841317
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096158645
SN - 0020-7543
VL - 59
SP - 7400
EP - 7422
JO - International Journal of Production Research
JF - International Journal of Production Research
IS - 24
ER -