A bus lane reservation problem in urban bus transit network

This work studies a new variant of lane reservation problem called a bus lane reservation problem. It aims to optimally select some road segments to be reserved for buses in a predetermined bus transit network such that bus travelers can be rapidly transited. Two realistic assumptions are made in this work: 1) the total travel time on each bus route should be completed within a given deadline; 2) a lane on a road segment can be reserved for buses only when the bus volume on it exceeds a given level. The former guarantees bus travel time in order to improve the service level of a bus transit system. The second ensures minimum bus utilization on a reserved lane. However, private vehicles are not allowed to pass the bus exclusive lanes. Such a bus lane reservation strategy causes negative traffic impact on private vehicles. The objective of the problem is to minimize the negative traffic impact of reserved lanes. For the problem, we first construct an integer linear programming model and demonstrate its complexity to be NP-hard. Then, we propose a cut-and-solve algorithm to obtain its optimal solution. The computational results on randomly generated instances show that the proposed method is more efficient than the optimization software CPLEX 12.4.