Holding times to maintain quasi-regular headways and reduce real-time bus bunching
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
2023
Subject Area
mode - bus rapid transit, operations - coordination, place - north america, place - urban
Keywords
Bus bunching, Real-time, Holding time, Transit operations, Beam search
Abstract
Real-time control strategies deal with the day’s dynamics in bus rapid transit systems. This work focuses on minimizing the number of buses of the same line cruising head-to-tail or arriving at a stop simultaneously by implementing bus holding times at the stops as a control strategy. We propose a new mathematical model to determine the bus holding times. It has quadratic constraints but a linear objective function that minimizes the bus bunching penalties. We also propose a beam-search heuristic to reduce computational solution time to solve large instances. Experimental results on a bus rapid transit system simulation in Monterrey, Mexico, show a bus bunching reduction of 45% compared to the case without optimization. Moreover, passenger waiting times are reduced by 30% in some scenarios. For real-world instances with 60 buses, the beam-search approach provides solutions with an optimality gap of less than 5% in less than 3 s.
Rights
Permission to publish the abstract has been given by SpringerLink, copyright remains with them.
Recommended Citation
Olvera-Toscano, C. M., Ríos-Solís, Y. Á., Ríos-Mercado, R. Z., & Sánchez Nigenda, R. (2023). Holding times to maintain quasi-regular headways and reduce real-time bus bunching. Public Transport, 15, 595-628.
