The Stop Location Problem with Realistic Traveling Time

Abstract

In this paper we consider the location of stops along the edges of
an already existing public transportation network. This can be the
introduction of bus stops along some given bus routes, or of railway
stations along the tracks in a railway network. The positive effect of new stops is given by the better access of the customers to the public transport network, while the traveling time increases due to the additional stopping activities of the trains which is a negative effect for the customers.

Our goal is to locate new stops minimizing a realistic traveling time
which takes acceleration and deceleration of the vehicles into account. We distinguish two variants: in the first (academic) version we locate $p$ stops, in the second (real-world applicable) version the goal is to cover all demand points with a minimal amount of realistic traveling time. As in other works on stop location, covering may be defined with respect to an arbitrary norm. For the first version, we present a polynomial approach while the latter
version is NP-hard. We derive a finite candidate set and an IP formulation. We discuss the differences to the model neglecting the realistic traveling time and provide a case study showing that our procedures are applicable in practice and do save in average more than 3% of traveling time for the passengers.