Scheduled paratransit transport systems

•Public bus services may provide door-to-door services to people with a disability.•The relevant design problem may be modeled as a MILP and solved to optimality.•Such systems may be tuned appropriately for various transport environments.•The design should balance nominal route disruption with paratransit service level.•A practical design process uses key parameters to obtain the desired system design.

In this paper we focus on ways to provide individualized services to people with mobility challenges using existing modes of public transport. We study the design of an interesting case, in which a bus operating in a public transport route may diverge from its nominal path to pick-up passengers with limited mobility and drop them off at their destination. We have modeled the design problem by a mixed integer-linear program, and we developed an exact Branch and Price approach to solve it to optimality. The proposed approach includes a labeling algorithm in which we introduced appropriate dominance rules, which do not compromise optimality. We have compared the efficiency of our approach with that of related algorithms from the literature. Furthermore, we have used the proposed approach to study key aspects of the system design problem, such as the effect of various constraints on the service level, and the tuning of the system’s parameters to address different transport environments.