2016 Volume E99.A Issue 1 Pages 310-318
This paper describes a hierarchical and cooperative transport system with demand responsive buses to improve service quality of public transport system in city area and its suburbs. To provide the demand responsive buses generally requires planning route and schedule called dial-a-ride problem. However, the problem complexity increases with the increasing of the number of requests. Therefore, we propose the hierarchical and cooperative transport system. Framework of the system can reduce scale of the problem by grouping customers. We have evaluated the proposed system on a static simulation and a dynamic microscopic simulation. The simulation result has shown the system could improve service quality by reducing customer's load. Moreover, the result of the dynamic simulation have provided the detailed features of the system.