A SIMULATION MODEL FOR EVALUATING ADVANCED DIAL-A-RIDE PARATRANSIT SYSTEMS

Liping Fu

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2002

Subject Area

operations - reliability, infrastructure - vehicle, ridership - demand, mode - paratransit

Keywords

Vehicle locating systems, Technological innovations, Simulation, Reliability, Productivity, Production rate, Paratransit services, Hardware (Computers), Electronic computers, Digital communication systems, Dial a ride, Demand responsive transportation, Computers, Computer simulation, Case studies, AVL, Automatic vehicle location, Automatic location systems, APTS, Advanced technology, Advanced public transportation systems

Abstract

Advanced information technologies such as automatic vehicle location (AVL), digital telecommunications and computers can be used in dial-a-ride paratransit (also called demand responsive transit) systems for improved productivity and reliability. This paper presents a simulation system to facilitate the evaluation of the potential effects that these technologies may bring to a paratransit system. The paper discusses the general concepts, models and computational techniques applied in the simulation system, focusing on how various components are modeled and how they interact with each other in the overall simulation framework. The simulation system is applied to evaluate the potential operational improvement that may be attained from the application of AVL technology. A series of simulation experiments were performed on a set of hypothetical cases and a realistic example. The simulation results show that AVL benefit due to increased flexibility in dynamic scheduling is highly-case dependent, but it should be stressed that the simulation study presented in this paper is still limited in representativeness and that further research is needed for a more complete sensitivity analysis.

Comments

Transportation Research Part A Home Page: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09658564

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