The traditional vehicle scheduling problem attempts to minimize capital and operating costs. However, the carbon footprint and toxic air pollutantshave become an increasingly important consideration. This paper studies the bus-scheduling problem and evaluates new types of buses that use alternative energy sources to reduce emissions, including some toxic air pollutants and carbon dioxide. A time-space network based approach is applied to formulate the problem to reduce the numbers of arcs in the underlying network; CPLEX is used to solve the problem. The results show that the bus-scheduling model can significantly reduce the bus emissions hence reducing the carbon footprint of the transit operation while only slightly increasing operating costs. (A) Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
Samenvatting