Bus Routing System Research Articles

Exactly solvable dual bus-route model.

In 1998, O'Loan etal. introduced a simplified bus-route model to illustrate bus dynamics. However, fluctuations in passenger numbers make it challenging to achieve an exact solution for the model's stationary state, as these fluctuations can impact bus behavior. In this study, we present an exactly solvable model for a dual bus-route system that builds upon O'Loan etal.'s model. This dual model allows us to comprehensively analyze bus-route dynamics. Our model introduces additional parameters not previously considered by O'Loan etal. to account for neighboring effects and align with an observation in the original model, which can influence the average stationary current and velocity of buses. When the neighboring effect is weak, our model behaves similarly to O'Loan etal.'s bus-route model. However, with a strong neighboring effect, our model exhibits intriguing characteristics. Additionally, in some limiting cases, our model recovers well-known models such as the simple exclusion process, its generalization, the cooperative exclusion process, and the RNA polymerase model during the elongation stage.

Evaluation of Garden State Parkway Alternate Bus Routing Field Operational Test

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the New Jersey Garden State Parkway (GSP) Alternate Bus Routing (ABR) system, an Advanced Public Transportation System (APTS). The GSP ABR Field Operational Test (FOT), which was conducted on a small portion of the parkway, was mainly concerned with real-time routing of New Jersey Transit (NJT) buses traveling the GSP to a parallel alternate route to avoid congestion on the parkway.One of the most important features of this FOT is the use of NJT buses as probe vehicles that provide real-time travel-time information to the bus routing algorithm. The use of probe vehicles for network surveillance increases the attractiveness of similar systems that can be deployed over larger networks where infrastructure-based surveillance can be prohibitively expensive. The functional evaluation of GSP ABR includes the collection and analysis of data from various sources including traffic sensors, probe vehicles, and surveys conducted among transit bus operators and system users.During the official testing period in 1997, the GSP ABR system produced accurate diversion messages, which proved the reliability of the system. However, the relatively short length of the alternate route, U.S. Route 9, and similar traffic patterns observed on both routes did not give the evaluation team the opportunity to observe scenarios where statistically significant travel-time improvements exist. This result prevented the evaluation team from reaching conclusive recommendations in terms of the effectiveness of this FOT. However, the survey results show that both transit bus operators and ABR system operators believe the system can be very beneficial if implemented in a different network.From a policy point of view, the general conclusions of the functional tests presented along with a list of lessons learned can be used in the effective design of future FOTs in the area of APTS.

Dealing with uncertainty in agent-based models for short-term predictions.

Agent-based models (ABMs) are gaining traction as one of the most powerful modelling tools within the social sciences. They are particularly suited to simulating complex systems. Despite many methodological advances within ABM, one of the major drawbacks is their inability to incorporate real-time data to make accurate short-term predictions. This paper presents an approach that allows ABMs to be dynamically optimized. Through a combination of parameter calibration and data assimilation (DA), the accuracy of model-based predictions using ABM in real time is increased. We use the exemplar of a bus route system to explore these methods. The bus route ABMs developed in this research are examples of ABMs that can be dynamically optimized by a combination of parameter calibration and DA. The proposed model and framework is a novel and transferable approach that can be used in any passenger information system, or in an intelligent transport systems to provide forecasts of bus locations and arrival times.

A GIS-based Analysis for Examining the Effect of Serviceability Improvement due to Reforming the City Bus Route System

Public transportation is essential for citizens’ traveling. However, private bus companies are not willing to establish new routes if they are not guaranteed some revenues by running the new bus lines even if some citizens are excluded from bus service areas. This is especially true of small-medium sized cities where the density of demand population is much lower. Nevertheless, it is necessary to provide public transit services as a type of indispensable public goods for citizens’ daily life regardless of the possibility of generating profits. Furthermore, due to the constraints of the resources available to service provision in monetary terms for both local agencies and bus companies, it is critical to improve the overall serviceability without requiring considerable additional costs. For this reason, reforming the local bus routing system without any significant investment for setting up new routes is necessary. This study aims at investigating serviceability improvement effects derived from reforming the city bus route system by analyzing some upward changes in terms of the number of citizens contained in the reformed system. The analysis is made in the framework of GIS in such a way that the numbers of citizens who can access the services before and after the reform are compared. The city of Chungju, located in Chungbuk Province, which is an example of a small-medium sized city in South Korea, was selected as the study area for the empirical analysis. According to the analysis results, the bus route reform in the study area improved the overall serviceability in that it contained more service recipients after the reform. Furthermore, it turns out that the overall bus running time also decreased in the reformed route system.

An Investigation of the Effect of Government Subsidy Scheme to Bus Industry on the Efficiency of Inner-City Bus Route System

This study is focused on the effect of reformation of public transportation system on the efficiency of bus route system as a result of change of government subsidy scheme. Two types of government subsidy scheme has been considered and before and after analysis by Data Envelopment Analysis technique has been carried out for bus routes in Ulsan Metropolitan City. The analysis output has shown that there is no clear evidence to clarify the relationship between the change of government subsidy scheme and the efficiency of bus route system. There are two types of backgrounds may be suggested for this situation such as more longer period necessary to identify the policy effect and limitation to increase the number of passenger in a provincial city. Tobit regression analysis has also been conducted to discover the most effective variables for maximum efficiency and three variables including route length, frequency per vehicle per day, and headway are found to be influential. It is also seen that strategy to minimising input factors and service upgrade plan such as shortened route length and headway, increasing frequency per vehicle are necessary to develop the efficiency of bus routes operated in Ulsan city.

A realistic cellular automata model of bus route system based on open boundary

In this article, a cellular automata model under opening boundary condition is proposed to simulate the characteristics of bus route. Through massive numerical simulations, phase diagram is obtained, which consists of four regions, including uniform region, insufficient capability region, bunching region, and serious congestion region. By studying the characteristics of each phase region and comparing the average speed and utilization, it is found that the position in uniform region or bunching region but near to the border of insufficient capability region is the best. Furthermore, phenomena of inhomogeneous bus stop situations are simulated, and resolution of driving shuttle buses is discussed. Comparing the simulation results with the real-life bus route investigation, some similarities are found.

Institutional and Regulatory Options for Bus Rapid Transit in Developing Countries

An increasing number of cities are looking at bus rapid transit (BRT) as a lower-cost alternative to meeting their mass transit needs. Less fully explored, however, has been the link between BRT and the implementation of transit system regulatory reforms. In a growing number of cities around the world, the introduction of a BRT system has also been used to implement some important long-term transit-sector reforms. Because BRT makes bus operations more profitable, the introduction of BRT gives the municipality additional leverage to demand more from private operators. This paper discusses how, in an increasing number of cities, BRT projects have been used to ( a) facilitate a smooth transition to a sometimes more efficient trunk-and-feeder or hub-and-spoke bus routing system, ( b) increase private-sector investment in the transit system, and ( c) change private bus operating contracts to include quality-of-service requirements.

Institutional and Regulatory Options for Bus Rapid Transit in Developing Countries: Lessons from International Experience

An increasing number of cities are looking at bus rapid transit (BRT) as a lower-cost alternative to meeting their mass transit needs. Less fully explored, however, has been the link between BRT and the implementation of transit system regulatory reforms. In a growing number of cities around the world, the introduction of a BRT system has also been used to implement some important long-term transit-sector reforms. Because BRT makes bus operations more profitable, the introduction of BRT gives the municipality additional leverage to demand more from private operators. This paper discusses how, in an increasing number of cities, BRT projects have been used to (a) facilitate a smooth transition to a sometimes more efficient trunk-and-feeder or hub-and-spoke bus routing system, (b) increase private-sector investment in the transit system, and (c) change private bus operating contracts to include quality-of-service requirements.

Realistic bus route model considering the capacity of the bus

This paper investigates the bus route behavior using a more realistic cellular automaton model in which the bus capacity is considered. It is shown that with the introduction of bus capacity, four new states appear compared with the previous works. The results enable us to conclude that the efficiency of the bus route system cannot be enhanced simply through increasing the number of buses. Moreover, it is pointed out that a proper value of the bus capacity can lead to the optimal configuration of the bus system.

Bunching and delay in bus-route system with a couple of recurrent buses

We study the behavior of a couple of recurrent buses on a circular route with many bus stops. The single bus model is extended to a bus-route system with a couple of recurrent buses. It is found that the conventional schedule-time phase bifurcates into three new phases: bunching, regular, and oscillatory phases. The phase diagram is presented for the dynamical transition. It is shown that the dynamical transition depends on the velocity-amplification factor and number of bus stops.

A bus routing system for rural school districts

Low-cost microcomputer hardware is combined with a powerful low-cost mapping software to create a system capable of importing and updating digitized road maps. It generates routes aiming to reduce the number of buses required and the fleet traveling distance by an expert system approach. It also allows planner participation in the process. Application to a real-world rural school district is discussed.

Automated pupil transportation

An automated school bus routing and scheduling system employs a combined minimum distance linking algorithm with special techniques to produce practical and efficient school bus routes. The routes produced satisfy bus loading policy and passenger riding time constraints and scrupulously avoid potential vehicle/passenger road hazards. The Pupil Transportation and Assignment System (PTAS) uses a modified version of the Clarke-Wright algorithm[1] for constructing routes. It features several innovations heretofore unavailable in commercial transportation programs. For example, PTAS is characterized by the novel application of geocodingt † † †Geocoding—The process of encoding a map for use in a computer, whereby people and things are related to their geographic location. techniques for digital encoding of the transportation network and for graphical and textual editing of programs to eliminate inconsistencies and to aid in the evaluation of preliminary route structures. While PTAS addresses the technical problems of routing, scheduling and loading school buses efficiently, economically and safely, it is unique in that it was designed to allow a nontechnical user to interact with the system with a minimum of supervision, i.e., to modify and update the computer-generated routes and schedules. Furthermore, PTAS can be used to automatically generate a variety of administrative backup data—for example, but routes, pupil lists, dollars reimbursed from the state, and narrative route descriptions.