Joint Planning and Scheduling of Modular Vehicles for Passenger-Freight Integration

Abstract: This paper proposes a modular vehicle system for passenger-freight integration along a bidirectional transit corridor. The system uses homogeneous units that can be coupled into vehicles and assigned to either passenger or freight service. Freight is carried by dedicated units, with loading and unloading coordinated with docking and undocking and separated from passenger boarding and alighting. To better respond to uncertain passenger demand and integrate freight transport, vehicles can be reconfigured at intermediate stations, where they can also depart and terminate. We jointly optimize departure-specific service routes, timetables, vehicle compositions, unit schedules, and passenger-freight demand assignments, with unit reuse constrained by explicit docking and undocking times. These decisions are modeled on a space-time-state network and formulated as a stochastic mixed-integer program that minimizes unit deployment costs, passenger waiting costs, and penalties for unmet freight demand. Passenger demand uncertainty is addressed using linearized chance constraints. To solve the problem, we develop an exact Benders decomposition algorithm with valid inequalities and a warm-start strategy, together with a tailored decomposition-based heuristic for larger instances. Computational experiments on instances generated from representative transit corridors in Gothenburg demonstrate the effectiveness of the Benders algorithm for small- and medium-sized instances and the scalability of the heuristic for larger problems. Sensitivity analyses highlight the value of accounting for passenger demand uncertainty and the effects of temporal overlap between passenger and freight demand. Comparisons with benchmark transit systems further demonstrate the operational advantages of the proposed modular integrated system.