Guest Editorial to the Special Issue Public Transport Optimization: From Theory to Practice

Public Transport Optimization is an area of growing interest both in the scientific community and in public transport companies. Many complex and challenging optimization problems arise in the field and require advanced solution methods. Effective Operations Research (OR) approaches have been developed by academics, and their usefulness has been empirically proven in real-world case studies. However, OR methods are not often applied directly in practice, although the trend is improving. The special issue is divided into two main streams: the first one (see Section 1.1) includes scientific papers that propose innovative methods to public transport optimization problems and articles that present new libraries of benchmark instances, while the second stream (see Section 1.2) is dedicated to interviews with experts from public transport companies who explain how OR is applied in their company and which advantages and difficulties they have encountered in making it work in practice.