A computational tool for optimizing the urban public transport: A real application

In this work, we have conducted a study to evaluate and improve the performance of an urban transportation system. Specifically, we have designed an algorithm for obtaining new routes and assigning buses to these routes. The objective is to optimize the service level, measured as the sum of the time the passengers have to wait at the bus stops plus the duration of their journey. As a result, a user-friendly computational tool has been designed, which is currently used by the Burgos City Council. The tool has an attractive graphic interface and is flexible, allowing modifications in the input data. The solutions yielded by the system show an improvement of almost 10% in the service level. The work includes an analysis to identify which set of stops could be repositioned to improve even more the service level.