Estimating demand for paratransit bus services for people with disability

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Public transport agencies have the responsibility of providing efficient, productive, and reliable service that is perceived positively by all members of the public, especially for passengers with disabilities who are heavily reliant on this service. One growing challenge for public transport agencies and their passengers with disabilities is predicting the demand for paratransit and on-demand services. Paratransit service is a special service where passengers with disabilities may request a ride directly from their home to their desired destination at a time they specify in the day. In a city with 2.7 million residents like Toronto, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) receives around 13,000 daily requests for paratransit and on-demand services. As a result, the TTC must develop schedules on a daily basis to accommodate all paratransit and on-demand requests. In response, companies like Giro has developed software to help public transport agencies prepare these daily schedules, including allocating on-demand taxi services to cover the gap when no paratransit bus is available. The Hastus-OnDemand software developed by Giro works using a series of optimization algorithms that depend on a set of assumptions made to enable quick schedule generation for immediate use by public transport agencies. A major challenge that the Hastus-OnDemand software faces is the prediction of demand in a day or by the hour. The lack of such demand information can add to computation time, causing delays in scheduling, and can cause a reliance on demand assumptions to reach an optimum solution for the scheduling problem that may not be correct due to the lack of information.In this project, I will be using 2 years of archived data from the TTC when they used the Hastus-OnDemand software to do bookings and will work with Giro to add a demand prediction module to the Hastus-OnDemand software. The data is currently owned by Giro and access is provided under an agreement for research and development. A generic demand model will be developed as part of the project that will enable Giro to include a demand model as an input in the Hastus-OnDemand software to help in predicting expected daily demand in other regions where the Hastus-OnDemand software is used.