A Real-Time Passenger Flow Estimation and Prediction Method for Urban Bus Transit Systems

Abstract

Bus service is the most important function of public transportation. Besides the major goal of carrying passengers around, providing a comfortable travel experience for passengers is also a key business consideration. To provide a comfortable travel experience, effective bus scheduling is essential. Traditional approaches are based on fixed timetables. The wide adoptions of smart card fare collection systems and GPS tracing systems in public transportation provide new opportunities for using the data-driven approaches to fit the demand of passengers. In this paper, we associate these two independent data sets to derive the passengers’ origin and destination. As the data are real time, we build a system to forecast the passenger flow in real time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper, which implements a system utilizing smart card data and GPS data to forecast the passenger flow in real time.