For an integrated public transport system, metro feeder buses become a key commuter transport mode connecting the suburban residential center and main transit lines in many Chinese mega cities. As the feeder bus is usually operated in a lower frequency, relative to the metro, the transfer impedance may be restrained. In this study, we attempt to design timetable for a metro feeder bus route. Two timetable designs are proposed: static and dynamic designs. In the static timetable design, it is assumed that the metro train service is frequent and maintains an even headway, while feeder bus service is infrequent and bus headway is integer multiple of metro train headway. The bus headway is determined based on the fleet size (and/or bus round trip time) constraint. Furthermore, considering that metro and bus arrival times are deterministic, the offset between metro train arrival and bus departure times is set to be equal to transfer walk time. The dynamic design approach considers the static timetable and further improves on it to minimize transfer wait time based on an average weekly train specific transfer volume data. The dynamic design problem is solved by the proposed algorithm which can transform multi-variable unconstrained optimization into a sequence of single variable search.
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