###### Abstract  
This paper provides a simulation and optimisation-based system to combine public transport (PT) with ride-pooling services (RP). According to the International Transport Forum (ITF), the RP could be established as a feeder of PT and included as the first or last leg of the journey with the option of transferring to/from PT in between. The system contains a dispatching core that uses an optimisation model with heuristic parameters to quickly analyse the potential permutations for each request. This topic is frequently based on simplistic modelling in the literature, and it has not been extensively tested in major urban regions. The whole metropolitan region of Barcelona is employed in this study, with a large realistic simulation model encompassing a 20 \(\times\) 15 km area with a PT network of about 3000 stations and 300 route lines and nearly 114,000 traffic links. This enables for a more accurate evaluation of system performance and trip quality computation. urban transportation; intermodal dispatching; ride pooling; public transportation Article An Approach Based on Simulation and Optimisation for the Intermodal Dispatching of Public Transport and Ride-Pooling Services  
[PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], K. An Approach Based on Simulation and Optimisation for the Intermodal Dispatching of Public Transport and Ride-Pooling Services  
202313380313380314 February 202314 March 20  
Other studies, such as [3], analyse in particular how the inclusion of a ride-pooling (RP) service, a more flexible transport mode for the user's needs, could encourage people to switch from their private car to this new mode of transportation. This is known as intermodal transportation, which is characterised by the use of several transport modes in a single journey, requiring users to transfer from one mode to another to reach their destination. This is distinct from multimodal transportation, which is defined as the use of a single transport mode for the entire journey from a variety of alternatives. This paper proposes a simulation- and optimisation-based system that allows studying the integration of a ride-pooling (RP) service system with a public transportation (PT) network. The simulation model is based on a microscopic representation of the ride-pooling system running in the urban traffic flow plus a sketched representation of the public transportation network. The simulation model assumes that users make requests to some centralised system of dispatching specially tailored to solve this specific intermodal scenario, being one of the contributions of this paper the development of an optimisation model for solving the dispatching process and a heuristic method for determining its parameters. This optimisation model considers that users may have preferences (or indifference) expressed at the request time regarding which modes of transport must be included and the number of legs required for its journey as well as the mode used in each leg. The simulation model also assumes that requests can be made to be served on the spot or booked for a later departure. A set of tests is presented to illustrate, as a proof of concept, the characteristics of this simulation model on a subset of specific scenarios in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. The structure of the paper is the following: after a review of the literature on intermodal approaches which include forms of shared mobility in Section 2, Section 3 describes the architecture of the simulation-based system proposed in this paper for evaluating an intermodal transport scenario between public transport and a fleet of ride-pooling vehicles on an urban area under a centralised dispatching system for easing/resolving the connections between both subsystems, this aspect being described in detail in Section 4 along with the dispatching method assumed by the simulation model. Section 5 describes the case-study scenario and its characteristics as well as a set of tests and their corresponding simulation results, showing the viability of the system.