An operation planning method for a demand-bus system based on local search of autonomous agents

In this paper, we propose an agent-based operation planning method for a demand bus system which is one of the on-demand transportation systems. It is necessary to solve a passengers assignment problem and a routing problem in real time in operating the demand bus system. In this paper, we propose an agent-based operation planning algorithm for the online problem. In the proposed method, an agent for each bus finds a set of routes by its local search, and selects a route by a cooperation of agents. By computational experiments, we examine an effectiveness of the proposed method.