Disruption management in public transit: the bee colony optimization approach

Disruptions in carrying out planned bus schedules occur daily in many public transit companies. Disturbances are often so large that it is necessary to perform re-planning of planned bus and crew activities. Dispatchers in charge of traffic operations must frequently find an answer to the following question in a very short period of time: How should available buses be distributed among bus routes in order to minimize total passengers' waiting time on the network? We propose a model for assigning buses to scheduled routes when there is a shortage of buses. The proposed model is based on the bee colony optimization (BCO) technique. It is a biologically inspired method that explores collective intelligence applied by honey bees during the nectar collecting process. It has been shown that this developed BCO approach can generate high-quality solutions within negligible processing times.