Regional Bus Timetabling Model with Synchronization

Creating a timetable plays an important role in regional bus scheduling, as it can minimize the transfer time of the passengers in every connection stop; meanwhile, synchronized departure can deal with the problem effectively. In this article, the regional bus timetabling is formulated as a special kind of Non-capacity Knapsack Problem (NKP) with a synchronization coefficient that is defined by the authors. The mathematical model has been built and the Nesting Taboo Search (NTS) algorithm has been developed to solve the problems. The computational results demonstrate that the high quality solutions to the NKP can be obtained by using the modified taboo search algorithm, and the algorithm is efficient and feasible.