Public Transport Optimization: From Theory to Practice

Road traffic congestion and air pollution can be significantly reduced through an increased use of public transport. In addition, providing well organized transport service leads to economic and social benefits to the community. Efficiency and reliability are crucial aspects that every potential passenger takes into account when choosing to travel by their car or instead with public transport means. Advanced Operations Research methods have been extensively and effectively applied to real-life case studies and have shown their capability of improving the performance of public transport services both in planning and during operations. Despite the good achievements reached by academic research, these techniques are still only rarely used in practice. This Special Issue addresses the challenges posed by real-life applications in public transport, and the novel approaches that can effectively tackle them with a special focus on the perspective of the transport companies. On one hand, the goal is to collect new methods that are/can be applied in practice showing their usefulness and encouraging public transport companies to more deeply take advantage of OR approaches. On the other hand, giving visibility to the needs of companies and practitioners could help the academic community better understand and identify promising future research directions. We invite scientists and practitioners to contribute with innovative exact and heuristic algorithms tackling strategic, tactical or real-time problems, with results obtained on real-life applications, and with emphasis on the managerial outlook.