# Estimating the Robustness of Public Transport Systems Using Machine Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08967 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08967/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.7828/) (2014)
- [Algorithm Engineering in Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04901/) (2015)
- [Finding Robust Periodic Timetables by Integrating Delay Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04554/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The planning of attractive and cost efficient public transport systems is a highly complex optimization process involving many steps. Integrating robustness from a passenger's point of view makes the task even more challenging. With numerous different definitions of robustness in literature, a real-world acceptable evaluation of the robustness of a public transport system is to simulate its performance under a large number of possible scenarios. Unfortunately, this is computationally very expensive. In this paper, we therefore explore a new way of such a scenario-based robustness approximation by using methods from machine learning. We achieve a fast approach with a very high accuracy by gathering a subset of key features of a public transport system and its passenger demand and training an artificial neural network to learn the outcome of a given set of robustness tests. The network is then able to predict the robustness of untrained instances with high accuracy using only its key features, allowing for a robustness oracle for transport planners that approximates the robustness in constant time. Such an oracle can be used as black box to increase the robustness within a local search framework for integrated public transportation planning. In computational experiments with different benchmark instances we demonstrate an excellent quality of our predictions.