Individualization of Public Passenger Transport: Relevant Planning Problems and Their Synchronization

Traditional public transportation systems are operated upon fixed timetables defining static schedules for the offered transportation means, e.g. buses, trains, ships. The passengers have to make their itineraries for choosing suitable transportation offers on the basis of the static schedules. On the opposite, private passenger transport is highly flexible. In its most flexible and individual form, it is performed by private cars driven by their owners. Several trend-setting concepts aim at individualizing and customizing public transport. Well-known examples for such flexible transportation modes are private ride-sharing agreements, agencies for arranging rides, bike and car-sharing, collect and bring services (e.g. for pupils or patients), hailed shared taxis, bus-on-demand services or in the future, maybe, even autonomous vehicles. Flexible services have to be synchronized for realizing multi-stage or multi-modal transportation chains. Moreover, vehicle routing and passenger routing have to be adjusted in a complicated two-echelon matching process. In this contribution, an overview of several types of customized, flexible passenger transportation services is given and the resulting routing problems are classified in order to check whether vehicle routing approaches in the area of cargo transportation can help to solve the optimization problems arising from the current trends of individualizing public transport.