Departure-expanded network for electric demand responsive feeder bus coordination with timetabled transit

On-demand feeder service using electric vehicles provides user-centered mobility solutions to increase connectivity in the low-demand area and reduce their negative impacts on the environment. However, most studies neglect the synchronization of feeder service and timetabled transit to minimize customers’ waiting time at transit stations. Moreover, existing studies on electric vehicle routing problems assume charging stations are uncapacitated. We propose an on-demand first-mile feeder service to coordinate its service with timetabled transit using electric buses/shuttles. The problem is modeled on a departure-expanded graph and formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem. Several new contributions are proposed in this study: considering flexible bus stops based on the meeting points of customers’ origins, coordinating arrival time at transit stations, and coordinating electric bus charging scheduling to ensure charging station capacity constraints. We provide an illustrative example and conduct numerical studies on a set of instances to validate the proposed methodology.