Solving the Urban Transit Routing Problem using a particle swarm optimization based algorithm.

•A particle swarm optimization based algorithm is applied to the Urban Transit Routing Problem.•Emphasis is given on appropriate representation of the route networks and the respective evaluation procedure.•Evaluation procedure considers not only the quality of service offered to each passenger, but also the costs of operator.•Results are compared on the basis of Mandl's benchmark problem, probably the most widely investigated benchmark problem.•Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to seven existing techniques applied to the same problem.