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Received Jan 8, 2018; Accepted Mar 22, 2018
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1. Introduction
Air transportation is becoming an increasingly important means of transportation for residents in China. Prior to the popularization of airport rail transit, ground transportation remained the major transportation mode linked with airports, specifically airport buses. Therefore, the efficiency of airport bus routes directly determines the convenience of the access to the airport and the service quality of air transportation. Many studies have been conducted on the planning of airport bus routes. The US Federal Aviation Administration proposed five steps for the ground transportation network planning of airports in 1998 [1], which is now widely used by most scholars. Xiao et al. (1995) presented a planning method combined with quantitative and qualitative analysis for the connection of California airport traffic [2]. Li (2004) expanded the five-step planning and proposed the planning framework of the airport ground transportation network from the perspectives of prediction, evaluation, survey, scheme formulation, and optimization [3]. Based on the theory of transportation corridor planning, the studies focused on the configuration scale and suitable construction time of airport bus routes using the rolling iteration method, the node-importance evaluation, or the maximum entropy method include Li (2006) [4], Zhai (2005) [5], Yang and Zhai (2009) [6], and Lacombe (1994) [7]. However, the optimization of the route layout is less frequently addressed, and the proposed methods lack operability. With the improvement of transportation informatization in recent years, the geographic information system (GIS) and computer simulation techniques have been more frequently applied to the optimization of airport bus routes. Lu (2011) [8] managed to establish the optimization model of an airport bus route with the aim of cost minimization. The optimization model with the goal of minimizing travel time that was solved by a hybrid genetic algorithm was proposed by Zhou et al. (2012) [9]. Kivett (1996) [10], Tambi and Griebenow (2003) [11], and Chebl and Mahmassani (2003) [12] developed the organizational method for the planning of route orientation, shift arrangement, and service time for airport buses and routine bus transit. Although theoretical support for the...