Integrated Multi-Modal Transit Network Design via Dynamic Line Generation

Abstract

The integration of fixed-route public transit and on-demand mobility services presents both a modeling challenge and a computational opportunity for large-scale network design. We propose a flow-based mixed-integer programming formulation that jointly optimizes transit line planning and service frequencies while explicitly capturing first- and last-mile connectivity via on-demand services, under a fixed operating budget. To achieve tractability at urban scale, we develop a novel column generation heuristic scheme with tailored pricing subproblems. Applied to networks and demand in Boston and Chicago, the framework yields operationally feasible designs that substantially increase demand served. Relative to transit-only and on-demand-only baselines, ridership increases by up to 20.99% and 93.58% in Boston, and by up to 10.63% and 149.84% in Chicago. Compared to a multi-modal benchmark, our approach improves ridership by 5.42% and 5.80% in Boston and Chicago, respectively. These results demonstrate that (i) joint co-design of transit routes, frequencies, and on-demand legs within a unified optimization framework yields substantially greater ridership than single-mode or decoupled approaches under equivalent budget constraints; and (ii) the proposed formulation and column generation pricing scheme admit tractable, operationally feasible, high-performing solutions relative to tested baselines.