Predictive Public-Transport Vehicle Control for Synchronized Transfers in Schedule-based Networks

Abstract

Synchronized passenger transfers in public-transport (PT) networks are not always materialized because of some stochastic and uncertain factors, such as traffic disturbances and disruptions, fluctuations of passenger demand and erroneous behavior of PT drivers. This work presents a novel tactic-based predictive control framework to increase, in a receding horizon control manner, the actual occurrence of synchronized transfers in schedule-based PT networks. This approach differs from the traditional mathematical-programming approach formulating the PT transfer synchronization problem as a monolithic-optimization problem and solves it over the whole planning horizon. The new tactic-based predictive control approach can dynamically optimize the PT vehicle movement process in schedule-based PT networks under random vehicle travel time. First, an event-activity network is constructed to represent the PT vehicle movement process. Second, an online optimization problem of the predictive control, based on a library of operational tactics, is developed to optimize the PT transfer synchronization problem. A procedure for real-time tactics deployment is also presented. Finally, a numerical example is utilized to illustrate the effectiveness of the methodology developed.