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Development of Analytic Methods for a Class of Decision Problems in Urban Road Transportation Organizations (URTO) for Efficient Operation of City Buses
Motivation for Research Problem
◆ Transport Sector in General
◆ Transport Sector in General
Transport sector is one of the main driving forces in contributing to the majority of the GDP of a country. Transport sector plays an important role in today economy and society by connecting people, businesses and resources (Ali et al. (2017)).
In India, road transport has acquired a prominent segment with the lion’s share of 4.8 percent in the GDP in 2021. It is a dominant mode of transport in terms of traffic share and contributing to the national economy (MoRTH (2020).
An efficient bus service is necessary for a country like India as the population is expected to increase from 121.1 crores to 152.2 crores from 2011-2036 as per the Census of India, and a majority of them cannot afford private transport. So, people living in urban cities rely heavily on the I-URTOs for their daily commutation.
However, transport sector does have fundamental environmental impacts on air, land, water, ecosystem and human health. According to a study on emissions from India’s transport sector, road transport buses contribute higher CO2 emissions, approximately 96.5 percent, compared to two-wheelers, passenger light motor vehicles, cars and jeeps, and taxis (Ramachandra and Shwetmala (2009).
In addition, the cities in India generate over two-thirds of the country’s income and contribute to 90% of government revenues. This economic growth can be sustained only if cities function efficiently. The city's efficiency further depends upon the efficiency of its urban road transport systems (Kumar Singh (2012)). Hence, it is indispensable for the I-URTOs to minimize the operational cost of the city buses (OCCBs).
◆ Existing facts on Profit/Loss per km (in INR) by I-URTOs
◆ Existing facts on Profit/Loss per km (in INR) by I-URTOs
Source: Review of the Performance of State Road Transport Undertakings for April, 2016 - March, 2017, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, GoI.
The major share of their revenue stream, to the extent of 96 to 97 percent, is contributed by the bus fares (Verma and Ramanayya (2015)). Hence, their immediate rescue is to increase the bus fares.
But the government puts these URTOs under contrary pressure to keep the fares at the current level to provide equitable service to the public.
Due to this, the I-URTOs find it challenging to raise their revenue sufficient enough to cover the OCCBs (Singh (2012).
◆ Computed CO2 Emission (in g/1000 km) by I-URTOs
**Computed from: Niranjani, G., & Umamaheswari, K. (2022). Minimization of Sustainable-Cost Using Tabu Search for Single Depot Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. Wireless Personal Communications, 126(2), 1481-1514.
Keeping both costs of operations with huge monetary losses and higher CO2 emissions in operating buses, there is a need for identifying all potential operational to strategic level decision problems to minimize the operational cost of city buses (OCCB).
Accordingly, this study identifies and addresses the following four decision problems for minimizing the OCCB, without changing the existing route and schedule of each bus, particularly by proposing descriptive/predictive/prescriptive methods for each of these decision problems with a sustainable objective for making optimal/efficient decisions to minimize the OCCB.
Work Done So Far
✔ Mandatory – Research Training Programme (RTP): Completed
✔ Identified Research Problems: Completed
✔ Literature Review and Identifying Research Gaps: On-going
✔ Research Problem Definition and Research Objectives: Completed
✔ Addressing Research Objective 1: On-going
• For the first research objective, as the ACBD problem can be viewed as a special type of transportation problem, a computational analysis of a selected set of best performing initial basic feasible solution (IBFS) methods available in the literature were carried out for minimizing the OCCBs of I-URTOs and the findings of the same were presented in the 5th European Conference Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, Rome, Italy, July 26-28, 2022.
• This work was further extended by considering all the 34 variants of IBFSs according to Mathirajan et al. (2022) and was applied to the ACBD problem to understand their relative performances. The results were presented in the International Conference on Optimization, Learning and Analytics in Business (OLAB), Kolkata, India, Dec 15-17, 2022.
✔ Addressing Research Objective 2: On-going
• As a preliminary study, 12 best-performing heuristics according to Mathirajan et al. (2022) was applied to the LD-ACBD problem. The results were presented in the 4th Asia Pacific Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Sep 11-14, 2023. This work was awarded the 3rd place at the IEOM Doctoral Dissertation Competition.
Selected Publications
Ghosh, R., & Mathirajan, M. (2023, September). A Comparative Analysis of Heuristic Methods for Facility Location and Allocation of Buses to Facilities in Urban Road Transportation Systems. Paper presented at the 4th Asia Pacific Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Jangid, S., Ghosh, R., & Mathirajan, M. (2023, September). A MILP Model for Single Depot, Single Truck and Multiple Drones for Last-Mile Delivery Problem. Paper presented at the 4th Asia Pacific Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Ghosh, R., & Mathirajan, M. (2022, December). Efficient Heuristic Methods for Minimizing the Dead Kilometer Cost of the Indian Urban Road Passenger Transport System. In International Conference on Optimization, Learning and Analytics in Business (OLAB)
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