Enhancing Equity in Public Transportation Using Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Optimization

Public transportation is a vital part of urban living. For instance, public transportation services help reduce road congestion, oil consumption and air pollution, and they serve people who need to travel throughout urban environments at the same time do not have access to private vehicles. The latter aspect is an important matter of social justice. Therefore, it is important to understand why the interest in equity in transport is growing, why public transportation should favor the transport disadvantaged, and why analyses of equity measurement and improvement are needed. Measuring the level of access to public transportation among the transport disadvantaged provides a theoretical basis for analyzing potential improvements in access by adjusting public transportation facility locations. This research will focus on modeling approaches used in establishing public transportation infrastructure and systems. Using GIS and spatial optimization models, the level of access to public transportation in terms of equity will be evaluated and improvement of the level of access will be attempted by offering new service stop locations. To this end, using the Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP), the optimal locations of potential facilities to cover equity favoring origin- and destination-based demand are identified. This research finally provides a set of optimal service stop locations maximizing coverage of origin- and destination-based demand simultaneously through implementation of a bi-objective model, applied to the City of Hilliard, Ohio

Location models in the public sector

The past four decades have witnessed an explosive growth in the field of networkbased facility location modeling. This is not at all surprising since location policy is one of the most profitable areas of applied systems analysis in regional science and ample theoretical and applied challenges are offered. Location-allocation models seek the location of facilities and/or services (e.g., schools, hospitals, and warehouses) so as to optimize one or several objectives generally related to the efficiency of the system or to the allocation of resources. This paper concerns the location of facilities or services in discrete space or networks, that are related to the public sector, such as emergency services (ambulances, fire stations, and police units), school systems and postal facilities. The paper is structured as follows: first, we will focus on public facility location models that use some type of coverage criterion, with special emphasis in emergency services. The second section will examine models based on the P-Median problem and some of the issues faced by planners when implementing this formulation in real world locational decisions. Finally, the last section will examine new trends in public sector facility location modeling.Location analysis, public facilities, covering models

Mod/Resc Parsimony Inference

We address in this paper a new computational biology problem that aims at understanding a mechanism that could potentially be used to genetically manipulate natural insect populations infected by inherited, intra-cellular parasitic bacteria. In this problem, that we denote by \textsc{Mod/Resc Parsimony Inference}, we are given a boolean matrix and the goal is to find two other boolean matrices with a minimum number of columns such that an appropriately defined operation on these matrices gives back the input. We show that this is formally equivalent to the \textsc{Bipartite Biclique Edge Cover} problem and derive some complexity results for our problem using this equivalence. We provide a new, fixed-parameter tractability approach for solving both that slightly improves upon a previously published algorithm for the \textsc{Bipartite Biclique Edge Cover}. Finally, we present experimental results where we applied some of our techniques to a real-life data set.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

A general approach for the location of transfer points on a network with a trip covering criterion and mixed distances

In this paper we consider a trip covering location model in a mixed planar-network space. An embed- ded network in the plane represents an alternative transportation system in which traveling is fasterthan traveling within the plane. We assume that the demand to be covered is given by a set of origin- destination pairs in the plane, with some traffic between them. An origin-destination pair is covered bytwo facility points on the network (or transfer points), if the travel time from the origin to destinationby using the network through such points is not higher than a given acceptance level related to the traveltime without using the network. The facility location problems studied in this work consist of locatingone or two transfer points on the network such that, under several objective functions, the traffic throughthe network is maximized. Due to the continuous nature of these problems, a general approach is pro- posed for discretizing them. Since the non-convexity of the distance function on cyclic networks alsoimplies the absence of convexity of the mixed distance function, such an approach is based on a decom- position process which leads to a collection of subproblems whose solution set can be found by adaptingthe general strategy to each problem considered.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad MTM2012-37048Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad MTM2015-67706-PJunta de Andalucía P10-FQM-584