Empowering WMATA’s MetroAccess Services with Operator-Rider Negotiations
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) provides ADA complementary paratransit service in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area through its MetroAccess program. Although MetroAccess riders, such as the disabled or seniors, pay a one-way fare of $2.5, WMATA faces an operating cost of over $70 per passenger trip. Given the fixed operating budget, WMATA and its contractors are in constant pursuit of innovative ways to boost operational efficiency and improve customer travel experience.
In collaboration of Challenger Transportation, a contractor of WMATA for providing paratransit services in two Maryland counties, and IT Curves, a leading paratransit scheduling software vendor, the research team seeks to develop and deploy novel vehicle routing and scheduling algorithms that are capable of conducting operator-rider schedule and mode negotiations. Schedule negotiation means a paratransit operator has the flexibility to adjust the requested pickup time within a predetermined limit for efficiency purposes while riders book their travels; mode negotiation means that those travel requests that do not fit well with the rest of the demand and consequentially lead to significant (per trip) cost are reassigned to alternative service providers (such as taxi or Uber). Although such strategies have been adopted by experienced call center agents and conducted in an ad hoc manner, they have not yet been incorporated in paratransit scheduling software suites because of the inherent difficulty in solving those challenging decision-making problems.
The MRMS (Mobile Resource Management System) is one of the major software suites available in the paratransit scheduling software market and has been used by dozens of paratransit operators throughout the U.S. MRMS is developed by IT Curves, whose core vehicle routing and scheduling engine is based on a decades-old algorithm know as parallel insertion. At present, all trip requests must be serviced by paratransit vehicles and no schedule adjustments are made. The research team plans to modernize the optimization engine in MRMS by designing and implementing a nested decomposition approach, which embeds a column generation-based solution algorithm within a rolling horizon framework. Given the specialized decomposition technique, the new algorithm is scalable and can potentially solve large-scale problems faced by MetroAccess operators, such as Challenger Transportation. More importantly, schedule and mode negotiations can be built into this solution approach by modifying the underlying integer programs. To validate the proposed paratransit routing and scheduling algorithm, Challenger Transportation will provide its daily trip requests, and the research team will quantify the improvements in key service metrics (such as trips serviced per hour, vehicle occupancy, and vehicle idle percentage) after upgrading the optimization engine in MRMS.
This proposed project can directly improve the service efficiency for a major paratransit service provider Challenger Transportation that services more than a thousand riders daily in two counties of Maryland (classified as small urban areas). If successful, the improved software can be adopted by other contractors of WMATA’s MetroAccess. With improved service efficiency, a paratransit operator can thus better address unmet paratransit demand, thus significantly mitigating the mobility challenges faced by MetroAccess customers.
Project R1 will involve three community partners. Challenger Transportation is a paratransit operator, as a contractor of the WMATA’s MetroAccess Program. Challenger Transportation is committed to becoming an early adopter of the developed operator-rider negotiation methods. IT Curves is a transportation software company based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, specializing in computer system developments for paratransit, microtransit, and non-emergency medical transportation. IT Curves will contribute real-world demand data for testing the developed optimization method and evaluating the benefits of rider schedule coordination. The team also expects to receive technical support and feedback from Mr. Christiaan Blake, Managing Director of the WMATA Department of Access Services.
TBD