Optimizing Dead Mileage in Urban Bus Routes. Dakar Dem Dikk Case Study

Abstract

This paper studies the buses assignment from their depots to their routes starting points in urban transportation network. It describes a computational study to solve the dead mileage minimization to optimality. The objective of this work is to assign the buses to depots while optimizing dead mileage associated with pull-out trips and pull-in trips. To do so, a new mixed-integer programming model with 0 - 1 variables is proposed which takes into account the specificity of the buses of Dakar Dem Dikk (the main public transportation company in Dakar). This company manages a fleet of buses which, depending on road conditions some buses cannot circulate on some roads of the network. Thus, buses are classified into two categories and are assigned based on these categories. The related mixed-integer 0 - 1 linear program is solved efficiently to minimize the cumulative distance covered by all buses. Numerical simulations on real datasets are presented.