Design a robust joint service of integrating demand responsive connectors (DRC) and shared bikes.

The integration of shared bikes and flexible transit services offers significant potential and benefits for urban transit systems. This paper presents a novel robust optimization framework for designing demand responsive connectors (DRC) that are fed by shared bikes. A two-stage model is formulated, with the first stage focusing on prereserved requests and the second stage addressing en-route random requests. The findings demonstrate that incorporating shared bikes can enhance the efficiency of serving en route late requests and reduce the required DRC vehicle fleet size. Additionally, it is observed that e-bikes are particularly suitable for this joint service due to their adaptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]