Collaboration decisions on disruption recovery service in urban public tram systems

This research focuses on the decisions on recovery services to deal with short-term disruptions in public tram systems. The disruption recovery approach used in Munich, Germany – the best service acclaimed by the public, is adopted as the basis to examine whether to collaborate with a taxi company to provide the recovery service and how to price to compensate the service. The two involving parties’ decision functions with the taxi’s average arrival time as the leading decision variable are formulated and analyzed. Both theoretical and numerical sensitivity analyses are conducted to shed lights on the critical factors affecting the decisions.

► Collaboration between tram and taxi companies for disruption recovery is studied. ► Decision models under fixed and linear pricing schemes are proposed and analyzed. ► A fixed pricing method is often more favorable than a linear pricing scheme. ► Numerical sensitivity analysis has generated more implementation guidelines.