Vehicle routing problem and car-pooling to solve home-to-work transport problem in mountain areas

Mountain areas have always been marginal zones for which providing a conventional public transport has been often difficult and burdensome. The present work was carried out within the European project INTERREG ALPINE SPACE called ASTUS - Alpine Smart Transport and Urbanism Strategies, a project focused on solving the mountain areas marginality problems and describes the methodology applied to the Italian pilot area constituted by the territory of “Unione Montana Comuni Biellese Orientale”, a union of 23 Municipalities in the northern area of Piemonte Region (Italy). The methodology described in this paper is related to the short term period, applicable immediately and having as its main objective the implementation of a collaborative system between conventional public transport service, car-pooling service and company mobility management. The methodology is made of four main steps: actual mobility demand and supply analysis with research for economies, implementation of supply scenarios, economic and environment plan for each scenarios and, finally, selection of the Reference one. The results show that the proposed methodology is clearly transferrable to every marginal area with the use of very few resources with a guided and goal-oriented way to improve car-pooling solutions in our reality.