Efficiency assessment of optimizing the schedule of urban passenger transport on duplicate sections

Abstract

Introduction. One of the quality indicators of urban passenger transport services is regularity of route vehicles, which directly depends on a well-designed schedule. An urgent task is to optimize urban passenger transport schedule in response to the improvement in passenger service quality. The purpose of this work is to develop alignment technique of time intervals between consecutive vehicles of different routes on duplicate sections and efficiency assessment of its application.Materials and methods. Optimization technique includes some steps: analysis of public transport network, determining a lot of duplicate sections and their characteristics, calculation the optimal time intervals among arrivals of route vehicles and alignment this intervals among consecutive route vehicles on duplicate sections, analysis of the quality of adjusted schedule of route vehicles and calculating the effect. The simulation model of urban passenger transport within simulation modelling system GPSS World is realized. It allows testing optimization technique of route vehicle scheduling.Conclusions. Adjusting technique of urban passenger transport schedule allows to increase movement steadiness of consecutive vehicles of different routes on duplicate sections, adjust traffic intervals for each route, shorten the traffic load on stations, reducing idle time and queue lengths of route vehicles in front of transport stops and also minimize waiting time for route vehicle by those passengers, who can be transported along several routes.Application. The described technique was tasted in the existing transport network of Gomel.Value. The obtained optimization results can be used by carriers and transport operators to improve the quality of services provided.