Urban rapid transit network design: accelerated Benders decomposition

This paper presents an urban rapid transit network design model, which consists of the location of train alignments and stations in an urban traffic context. The design attempts to maximize the public transportation demand using the new infrastructure, considering a limited budget and number of transit lines. The location problem also incorporates the fact that users can choose their transportation mode and trips. In real cases, this problem is complex to solve because it has thousands of binary variables and constraints, and cannot be solved efficiently by Branch and Bound. For this reason, some algorithms based on Benders decomposition have been defined in order to solve it. These algorithms have been compared in test networks. The project has been supported by the research project 70029/T05, from the Spanish “Ministerio de Fomento” and the research project TRA2005-09068-C03-01, from the Spanish “Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia”.