A procedure for the solution of the urban bus network design problem with elastic demand

In the last years, the sensitive increase of congestion phenomena in the urban areas has produced important changes for the role reserved to the public transport. This should become the main tool to solve urban transport problem. Critical phase for the planning of the public transport system is the network design problem (determination of routes and associated frequencies). This step may affect the performance of the system for the users and the successive planning steps involving the operator costs (bus and driver scheduling). In this paper, authors propose a solving procedure for the urban bus network design problem that explicitly takes into account the elasticity of the demand.