A feasibility study of a demand-responsive transportation system to be implemented in a suburban area of Milan is presented. The purpose is to determine whether substituting during evening hours the current public transportation system with a more flexible dial-a-ride system would lead to reduced operating costs and to improved service quality. Door-to-door as well as stop-to-stop services are considered, where the stops are those of the current public transportation network. The results obtained with insertion heuristics indicate that a door-to-door dial-a-ride service would considerably improve the average quality level while rejecting less than 2% of the requests and using a number of vehicles and a total driver time similar to the current ones. Moreover a stop-to-stop service requiring a substantially smaller fleet (33% reduction in number of vehicles and 19% in the total driver hours) would guarantee a comparable average quality level while satisfying more than 98% of the requests.
Abstract