Optimization of customized feeder bus for high-speed rail connection under travel time uncertainty

This study aims to design a high-quality customised feeder bus (CFB) service for high-speed railway (HSR) passengers while controlling operating costs. First, a CFB scheduling optimisation model considering travel time uncertainty is proposed to optimise the timetable with the design of the skip-stop pattern which would influence the selection of service paths, enabling a reduction in operation time. Second, to improve computation efficiency, this study suggests an iterative heuristic with a two-stage approach to address the travel time uncertainty. Numerical results demonstrated that compared with the commonly used algorithm, the genetic algorithm, the proposed algorithm could reduce the objective by 62.38% within a shorter time. Furthermore, compared with the traditional bus service, the CFB service generated by the proposed model could averagely reduce passenger travel time by 48.46%. These results indicated that the proposed model and algorithm could help to provide a more convenient access/egress service to HSR passengers.