A method for determining pickup and delivery locations of intercity customized bus based on passenger demand and POIs

Intercity customized bus is a new mode of road passenger transport that relies on the internet platform to obtain passengers' reservation travel demands and provide passengers with “door-to-door” transport service between cities. The determining of Pickup and Delivery locations is essential for its operation, as it provides the possibility of “door-to-door” direct transport service. Existing methods for determining Pickup and Delivery locations mainly focus on clustering passenger demand data, which will lead to the problem of passengers and drivers having difficulty in quickly finding sites in the road network. Therefore, this study aims to propose a new method for determining Pickup and Delivery locations both considering passenger demand data and POIs. Based on the passenger reservation data and AutoNavi Map API, suitable POI categories are selected to derive the actual walking distances and routes between passengers and different POIs. Through two rounds of screening, The POIs with the wider service coverage and the smallest actual walking distance for passengers was selected as the sites. The results show that by utilizing the new method for determining Pickup and Delivery locations, we identified the locations of suitable sites and controlled the actual walking distance of passengers within 500 m in the road network, which will provide convenience to both drivers and passengers. This study will provide a reference basis for optimizing the site setting in intercity customized bus.