The topic of integrating disabled persons in society is widely studied, especially nowadays as it is estimated that one billion people are living with disabilities. The research focus of this paper is on the integration of disabled persons to the public transport system with the emphasis on their full autonomy. Several models in operational research treat this problem, such as transport on-demand with its varieties, the shortest path problem, even though they are often understood to focus on public transport rather than accessibility to the public network itself. Providing a full service to persons with disabilities in a public transport system is a very long process, which involves many participants. The diversity of the needs of people with reduced mobility and the various interactions between these needs raises the level of complexity behind this process. To explore this problem, we used a decision-aiding approach, which allows to better guide the adaptations required from a transportation system while respecting both the issues at stake for stakeholders in the transportation value chain and the needs of people with disabilities. The contributions of this article are multifold. First, we use a multidisciplinary approach to develop matrix of the different fields of decision. Second, the decision-aiding process proposes a comprehensive analysis, which gives the ability to choose at any time the suitable model for the integration of disabled persons. Third, we put forth an algorithm of the relationship among existing optimization models, depending on the public network information, more precisely on the concrete accessibility on the public network. Last but not least, the crucial contributions in this paper is the practical implementation of the decision-aiding process.

Co-authors: Yan Cimon (CIRRELT), Igor Crévits and Saïd Hanafi (UPHF)

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