PhD Thesis Defense: Yifei Sun

For Zoom link, contact yifei.sun.TH@dartmouth.edu.

"Urban public transportation planning with endogenous passenger demand"

Abstract

An effective and efficient public transportation system is crucial to people's mobility, economic production, and social activities. The Operations Research community has been studying transit system optimization for the past decades. With disruptions from the private sector, especially the parking operators, ride-sharing platforms, and micro-mobility services, new challenges and opportunities have emerged. This thesis contributes to investigating the interaction of the public transportation system with significant private sector players considering endogenous passenger choice.

To be more specific, this thesis aims to optimize the public transportation system considering the interaction with parking operators, competition, and collaboration from ride-sharing platforms and micro-mobility platforms. Optimization models, algorithms and heuristic solution approaches are developed to design the transportation systems. The parking operator plays an important role in determining the passenger travel mode. We investigate the optimal transit frequencies and transit fares considering the parking operator’s response under a game-theoretic framework. A mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model is formulated considering endogenous passenger mode choice. A three-step solution heuristic is developed to solve the large-scale MINLP problem. With emerging transportation modes like ride-sharing services and micro-mobility platforms, this thesis aims to co-optimize the integrated transportation system. To improve the mobility of residents in the transit desert regions, we co-optimize the public transit and ride-sharing services to provide a more environment-friendly and equitable system. Similarly, we design an integrated system of public transit and micro-mobility services to provide a more sustainable transportation system in the post-pandemic world.

Thesis Committee

• Vikrant S. Vaze, chair
• Geoffrey G. Parker
• Robert A. Shumsky
• António Pais Antunes

Contact

For more information, contact Theresa Fuller at theresa.d.fuller@dartmouth.edu.