Opportunistic Sensing-Based Route Demand Assessment and Feeder Bus Scheduling

Abstract

Bus route scheduling and provisioning is the important aspect of the transportation system. The optimum bus provisioning offloads the crowd from the buses of the existing routes. It also attracts prospective commuters to switch to public transportation. The proposed system computes the route demand and feeder bus routes using the opportunistic sensing-based approach. It records the commuters’ queries and state—standing or sitting during the course of their journey by opportunistically using the data of commuters’ smartphone. Further, the proposed system computes the crowdedness level inside the bus and trip demand at various bus stops using the crowdsourced commuters’ record. Moreover, it also computes the chain of crowded segments for various routes based on the crowdedness level and trip demand aggregated over the time of multiple days. Subsequently, the proposed system applies the activity selection-based feeder bus scheduling algorithm for the crowded segment of various routes. We have validated the proposed approach using the simulation model for 10 bus routes of the bus rapid transit system (BRTS) of Ahmedabad city. The inclusion of the feeder buses reduces the number of crowded segments of the existing routes by 75.10%.KeywordsFeeder bus schedulingOpportunistic sensingCrowdedness level detectionTraffic simulationIntelligent transportation system