Robust Optimization of Customized Electric Bus Routes in Village-town Areas

Village-town passenger transportation resources have a low utilization rate, and most passengers cannot achieve their riding purposes within a reasonable time period. Considering the impact of fuel vehicles on the environment and cost, electric buses responsive to urban and rural demand are presented as a solution to these problems in this study: passenger demand information is collected and used to formulate a realistic optimization problem in which both the total cost of the bus company and the total travel time of passengers, are minimized. That is, a robust optimization model for the routes of urban and rural customized electric buses is constructed to meet passenger ride demand using the vehicle travel time on the road section as an uncertainty value. Passenger stations are numbered by using the improved NSGA-II algorithm; natural number coding, a simulated annealing fitness function, the order crossover method, and a specially designed mutation operation are also used. Considering practical scenarios, the times for getting on and off the bus are added to the total travel time of passengers to verify the rationality of the model and algorithm. The results show that using the proposed improved NSGA-II algorithm (improved fast non-dominated multi-objective optimization algorithm with elite retention strategy) reduces the average travel time was by 14.47% and the computing time by 39.81% compared to using the multi-objective genetic algorithm NPGA. For route optimization of passenger demand-responsive electric buses in village-town areas, the proposed improved NSGA-II algorithm produces more accurate solutions with a higher efficiency and performance than the multi-objective genetic algorithm NPGA. To minimize the cost of passenger buses, the total travel time of passengers should be reduced to the largest possible extent. This consideration is extremely important for optimizing long-distance passenger routes of demand-responsive electric buses in village-town areas.