579406 - Design of Integrative Systems for Multiple Accessible Transportation Services

Learning Objectives:

• In the decades characterized by ageing population, many accessible transportation organizations face challenges to serve people sustainably due to the limited increase of social welfare expenditure. With motivation of an application of operations research and engineering design in community transportation service sector, we collaborate with a community transportation organization which currently provides four types of transport services for people with travel inconveniences. The requirements of accessible services vary according to peoples’ travelling purposes and this poses numerous challenges for the organization to manage different services. In this research, we focus on integrating scheduled route (SR) with dial-a-ride (DAR) service for better use of vehicles. SR service is characterized as regular paratransit services whereas DAR provides door-to-door transportation services. We propose a new service arrangement which shares the vehicle for both services with a reservation strategy. To evaluate the proposed arrangement, we collect data from the organization and solve the vehicle routing problem using an optimization tool. Then, we compare the performance of reservation strategy and propose an integrative approach for the new service arrangement. It is expected the accessible transportation vehicles will be used with higher utilization and more people can be served by the proposed arrangement.