FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Licentiate seminar – Shairyar Malik

Demand-responsive public transport (DRT) provides flexible, request-based mobility and can complement conventional public transport where demand is dispersed or difficult to serve efficiently with fixed routes and timetables. Its flexibility, however, creates many possible service and operational configurations, while conclusions about performance can depend on how the service and passenger demand are represented, which outcomes are measured, and what evidence is available. This thesis aims to improve the methodological basis for modelling and evaluating selected aspects of DRT performance and use.

The thesis addresses this aim through three complementary studies. A systematic mapping study examines service and operational design aspects and performance metrics across 33 primary DRT modelling studies. A controlled simulation study uses 518 days of empirical passenger-demand data to compare four synthetic demand-generation models with simulated empirical demand under common operating conditions. An observational study analyses operational booking records and self-reported user data from a Swedish DRT pilot to examine realised performance outcomes, patterns of use, and the service’s travel role.

The findings distinguish representation from evaluation in DRT modelling. Service and operational characteristics may be present in a model without being directly optimised, varied, or sensitivity-tested. Direct evaluation focuses on operational choices such as fleet size, advance and dynamic scheduling, vehicle capacity, and ride-time/detour limits, and on outcomes including waiting time, cost of service,
request acceptance, and utilisation/pooling. The simulation study further shows that synthetic demand models with broadly similar aggregate demand can retain different temporal, spatial, within-day, and user-level structures and produce different simulated passenger and vehicle outcomes. No single demand model is closest to the simulated empirical reference across all evaluated measures. In the operational study, realised pooling and pickup reliability require interpretation in relation to trip characteristics, observation period, operational development, and outcome definitions. The user-level evidence also indicates differences in service use associated with private mobility resources and shows that reported travel alternatives span several travel modes and, for some respondents, trips that would otherwise not have occurred.

Taken together, the thesis shows that conclusions about DRT performance and use are conditional on what is represented, how passenger demand is represented, which outcomes are measured, and how the underlying evidence is generated and analysed. The contribution is methodological and bounded: it clarifies relationships between service representation, passenger-demand representation, performance measurement, and empirical evidence rather than proposing a universal DRT evaluation framework or a single estimate of DRT performance.