Coordinating feeder and collector public transit lines for efficient MaaS services

Coordinating the schedules of feeder and collector public transit lines can reduce the passenger travel times. With advances in smart mobility, mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) schemes allow passengers to book a combined ticket for all their trip legs. This detailed information about the origins and destinations of door-to-door trips offers the opportunity to coordinate the schedules of public transport lines to reduce the passenger travel times. In this study, we model the coordination problem of feeder and collector lines by explicitly considering the regularity of the feeder lines and the transfer times of passengers. The coordination problem is modeled as a nonlinear non-convex problem and reformulated to an easy-to-solve convex optimization problem. Because of the travel times uncertainty, we also introduce a stochastic optimization formulation based on the sample average approximation approach. We test the performance of our approach in a case study with feeder and collector lines in Singapore showing an improvement potential of 5%–10% in passenger travel times.