Paired-Line Hybrid Transit was the first in a series of “hybrid-transit” studies conducted by my group using a stylized design model.  This line of work, funded by an National Science Foundation between   2013 and 2016, was initiated by Peng Chen in his PhD thesis.  The main idea is to pair a demand-adaptive service with a fixed-route service so that the transit system can leverage the advantages of both while avoiding their drawbacks.  The paper was published in Transportation Research Part B in 2017.

For preprint, check  Hybrid Transit System Design_Journal_2.0

Abstract: This paper proposes and analyzes a new transit system that integrates the traditional fixed-route service with a demand-adaptive service. The demand-adaptive service connects passengers from their origin/destination to the fixed-route service in order to improve accessability. The proposed hybrid design is unique in that it operates the demand-adaptive service with a stable headway to cover all stops along a paired fixed-route line. Pairing demand-adaptive vehicles with a fixed-route line simplifies the complexity of on-demand routing, because the vehicles can follow a more predictable path and can be dispatched on intervals coordinated with the fixed-route line. The design of the two services are closely
coupled to minimize the total system cost, which incudes both the transit agency’s operating cost and the user cost. The optimal design model is formulated as a mixed integer program and solved using
a commercially available metaheuristic. Numerical experiments are conducted to compare the demand adaptive paired-line hybrid transit (DAPL-HT) system with two related transit systems that may be considered its special cases: a fixed-route system and a flexible-route system. We show that the DAPL-HT system outperforms the other two systems under a wide range of demand levels and in various scenarios of input parameters. A discrete-event simulation model is also developed and applied to confirm the correctness of the analytical results.