Multi-perspective Decision Support System for Hierarchical Bus Transportation Network Design‎: ‎Tehran Case Study

In this paper, a multi-perspective decision support system (MP-DSS) to design hierarchical public transportation network is developed. Since this problem depends on different perspectives, MP-DSS consists of two sub-systems with macro and micro sub-systems based on travel information, land use and expert knowledge. In the micro sub-system, two sub-modules are developed considering origin-destination demand matrix and attractive places to travel. In the first sub-system, based on traffic assignment models, the bus corridors can be extended and by the second approach, connectivity between attractive places can be provided by new bus lanes. Multi-commodity flow problem and spanning tree problem are used in these two sub-modules to assign the public services to the corresponding networks. The corridors obtained from these sub-modules are evaluated by experts board module. These corridors are used to extend bus rapid transit (BRT), exclusive bus lanes between multiple districts and shuttle buses for trips inside of district. A prototype of MP-DSS is developed to illustrate the results on Tehran network. The most important contribution of this paper is to generalize the different mathematical models with land use and expert knowledge which substantially improves the results of network designing problem.