The State Road Transport Undertakings
(SRTUs) are the economic providers of mass transport in
India. The institutional constraints imposed on the SRTUs
result in low productivity and inefficiency. In this fiercely
competitive environment, the state-owned public transport
industry cannot operate sustainably, showing mediocre
performance. With relatively scarce financial resources,
high political expectations, and competition between
operators, the efficiency and performance of the industry
must be improved by optimizing the available resources. In
this study, an integrated analytical hierarchy process–goal
programming technique considering both operators’ and
users’ perceptions is used for performance optimization.
The methodology starts with the selection of various performance indicators, considering both operators’ and users’
perceptions. The decision variables are then categorized
into user-oriented and operator-oriented. The analytical
hierarchy process (AHP), a multicriteria decision-making
tool, is then used to evaluate the decision variables and
calculate their weights to be used as penalties in goal
programming (GP). Pairwise comparison of decision
variables on the AHP rating scale was carried out by
experts associated with bus transportation and academia.
This was used to assign weights to the variables to denote
their priority based on their importance. Then, these
weights were assigned to the objective function of the GP
problem to find a solution that minimizes the weighted sum
of deviations from the goal values. As a case study, performance optimization of the Kerala State Road Transport
Corporation was undertaken. Twelve decision variables
were identified, by taking into account both user and
operator perceptions, viz. controllable costs, noncontrollable costs, taxes, staff per bus ratio (fleet operated), safety,
accessibility, regularity, load factor, fleet utilization, percentage of dead kilometers to effective kilometers, journey
speed, and percentage of cancelled kilometers to scheduled
kilometers. The perceived importance of each of these
decisive factors from both the users’ and operators’ perspectives was obtained from the experts and prioritized
using the AHP. The results indicated that operator cost and
staff per schedule were the most important variables for the
operators, while safety of travel had the highest weighting
according to the users’ perceptions. The optimal solution
indicated that increasing the accessibility, safety, and regularity would attract passengers to public transport, which
would in turn improve the load factor and influence operators to maximize fleet utilization and reduce cancellation
of schedules. Moreover, the solution also suggested that
decreasing the staff per bus would further reduce the
operating cost. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis was carried out to identify the impact of variations in the decision
variables on the performance of the system. The presented
method could be used for performance evaluation and
optimization of urban rail, metro, and various other public
transport systems.
& Raviraj H. Mulangi
ravirajmh@nitk.edu.in
Anila Cyril
cv15f02@nitk.edu.in
Varghese George
varghese@nitk.ac.in
1 Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of
Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, Mangalore,
Karnataka 575025, India
Communicated by Baoming Han.
123
Urban Rail Transit (2019) 5(2):133–144
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40864-019-0103-2 http://www.urt.cn/
Keywords Performance optimization · Analytical
hierarchy process · Goal programming · Public transport
1 Introduction
In India, rapid urbanization and motorization post independence have led to increased travel demand, triggering a
transport crisis that includes congestion, pollution, and
other environmental externalities. Mitigation of this transport crisis has become a challenging task in the transport
industry. Development of public transport has been identified as a sustainable solution for all major transport
problems. Moreover, public transport is the primary and
only means of transport for a large section of society in
India. The Working Group of Urban Transport [1] has
suggested a desirable share of public transport of 60% of
motorized trips to reduce energy needs and address the
transport crisis. Public transport undertakings are striving
to provide efficient and convenient travel. However, they
are not providing better travel options due to various
challenges in the public transport industry, such as financial
instability, incompetence, and unreliability. Excessive
operating cost, overstaffing, low productivity, and imprudent use of financial resources are a few of the institutional
issues, while inadequate frequency, increased travel time,
poor service quality, and overcrowding are a few of the
reasons why users are shifting away from public transport.
The declining share of public transport has caused the
public transport industry to become loss-making.
While the government has a complete monopoly over
the rail transport sector, there are many competing players
in the road transport industry. In this fiercely competitive
environment, state-owned public transport industry cannot
operate sustainably, showing mediocre performance. In this
respect, a crucial question is to identify which operating
practices and administrative regulations could improve the
public transport industry. Meanwhile, inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and the potential of public transport should be
determined by evaluating the performance in the current
scenario. Moreover, to improve the performance and efficiency in the face of reduced budgets, high political
expectations, and competition between operators, the performance of the industry must be improved by optimizing
the available resources.
In recent years, performance evaluation has become a
focus of attention in the public transport industry, as it is
viewed as a method to assess the outcomes of the system,
which can be further analyzed to decide upon improvement
strategies. Since public transport involves multiple stakeholders, optimization procedures must be performed rather
than just evaluation. Unfortunately, performance
optimi