Investigation of the influence of transit time on a multistate transportation network in tourism

Reliability has been widely used as a potential indicator of the performance assessment for several real-life networks. Focus on a multistate transportation network in tourism (MTN), this study evaluates the reliability of the MTN as a basis for investigating the influence of transit time. Reliability is the probability to fulfill transportation demand under the given time threshold and budget limitation and evaluated at various levels of transit times. An algorithm, which employs the boundary points and recursive sum of disjoint products technique, is proposed to evaluate the MTN reliability. According to the obtained results, this paper analyzes the influence of transit times on MTN reliability. Particularly, this paper discusses and provides some suggestions about the appropriate transit time to maintain reliability. Decision-makers in the tourism industry also can predetermine the significant drops of reliability to improve the relevant transit times. Besides, the proposed investigation is indicated and proved through an illustrative example and a practical case.