An anti-bunching strategy to improve bus schedule and headway reliability by making use of the available accurate information

Abstract

Bus bunching could seriously damage the stability of transit system. This resultant instability always causes a dissatisfying performance of transit system. The strategies of resisting bus bunching aim at improving schedule and headway reliability so as to improve the level of service of transit system. From a perspective of effectively using accurate and reliable information, a generalized framework is proposed to deal with bus bunching and explain the potential efficiencies of various existing anti-bunching strategies. In particular, a strategy that adaptively determines the actual holding time and/or adjusts the bus cruising speed when a bus arrives at a bus stop is studied in depth. The information required by this new strategy includes only the arrival time of the current bus at the current bus stop and the arrival times of the preceding bus at this bus stop and the next. The nonlinearity of boarding process is also taken into account in this new strategy. Numerical analysis and simulation experiment show that the new strategy can not only alleviate bus bunching and keep high schedule and headway reliability with less slack added in schedule, but also generate a relatively high commercial speed for the cruising buses.