Sequential Evolutionary Optimization for Improving Regularity-Based Bus Services
For high-frequency bus services in dense urban areas service regularity is becoming more critical than punctuality. Many transportation authorities have adopted regularity-based Key Performance Indexes (KPIs) for assessing the performance of bus operators and some of them have also introduced monetary penalty/bonus schemes. The service regularity is typically related to the Excess Waiting Times (EWT) of passengers at bus stops and bus operators plan and control their daily operations with the aim of reducing the EWT of bus services by mitigating bus bunching. However, finding an optimal set of control measures for improving regularity is a computational intractable problem and that hinders the implementation of efficient dynamic control strategies. Because of this, the authors' work makes effort on improving service regularity by introducing a problem-specific evolutionary algorithm (EA) for speeding up the search of optimal control measures (such as dispatching times re-planning and bus holding). Control measures generated by their method are tested against control measures generated by commercial software and in-house expertise of a major bus operator in south Asia demonstrating an up to 22% passenger EWT improvement with dispatching time re-planning that increases further to 35% after implementing bus holding. Computational tests showcased also that the authors' method can optimize an entire bus service with 240+ daily trips in163-4 minutes allowing dynamic control of bus operations.
-
Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP050 Standing Committee on Bus Transit Systems.
-
Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Gkiotsalitis, Konstantinos
- Maslekar, Nitin
-
Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
- Date: 2017
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 18p
- Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Bus transit operations; Dispatching; Genetic algorithms; Level of service; Optimization; Urban areas; Waiting time
- Subject Areas: Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01623283
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 17-00463
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Jan 24 2017 3:31PM