Abstract
In public transport operations, vehicles tend to bunch together due to the instability of passenger demand and traffic conditions. Fluctuation of the expected waiting times of passengers at bus stops due to bus bunching is perceived as service unreliability and degrades the overall quality of service. For assessing the performance of high-frequency bus services, transportation authorities monitor the daily operations via Transit Management Systems (TMS) that collect vehicle positioning information in near real-time. This work explores the potential of using Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) data from the running vehicles for generating bus schedules that improve the service reliability and conform to various regulatory constraints. The computer-aided generation of optimal bus schedules is a tedious task due to the nonlinear and multi-variable nature of the bus scheduling problem. For this reason, this work develops a two-level approach where (i) the regulatory constraints are satisfied and (ii) the waiting times of passengers are optimized with the introduction of an evolutionary algorithm. This work also discusses the experimental results from the implementation of such an approach in a bi-directional bus line operated by a major bus operator in northern Europe.
Highlights
During the scheduling phase of bus services, a set of conflicting objectives are optimized such as the operational costs and the waiting times of passengers at stops
Many times it is impractical to introduce new trips in a route in order to meet the passenger demand fluctuations given the inherent resource limitations. This paper explores this area by including resource constraints such as driver meal and resting times in the problem definition and developing a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to optimize the resulting objective function as it is presented
This study focused on the timetabling problem with the objective of reducing the excess waiting times of passengers at control point stops while satisfying the regulatory constraints
Summary
During the scheduling phase of bus services, a set of conflicting objectives are optimized such as the operational costs and the waiting times of passengers at stops. This paper focuses on the first problem of timetable design for high frequency services with a specific target of reducing the passenger waiting time fluctuations and satisfying the resource limitations in terms of fleet size and regulatory constraints. Regulatory constraints such as bus driver meal breaks, layover times and dispatching headway bounds are interconnected and any change in the bus timetables can lead to violations of different constraints. The performance of the proposed algorithm, the improvement in the timetable design and the improvement of passengers waiting times at stops in real operations under different assumptions of travel time variations are tested in a bi-directional bus line from a major bus operator in northern Europe
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