A self-adaptive method to equalize headways: Numerical analysis and comparison

In uncontrolled bus systems, buses tend to bunch due to the stochastic nature of traffic flows and passenger demand at bus stops. Although schedules and priori target methods introduce slack time to delay buses at control points to maintain constant headways between successive buses, too much slack required delay passengers on-board. In addition, these methods focus on regular headways and do not consider the rates of convergence of headways after disturbances. The authors propose a self-adaptive control scheme to equalize the headways of buses with little slack in a single line automatically. The proposed method only requires the information from the current bus at the control point and both its leading and following buses. This elegant method is shown to regulate headways faster than existing methods. In addition, compared to previous self-equalizing methods, the proposed method can improve the travel time of buses by about 12%, while keeping the waiting time of passengers almost the same.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trb.2016.02.008
• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261515302071
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/01912615
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Liang, Shidong
  • Zhao, Shuzhi
  • Lu, Chunxiu
  • Ma, Minghui
• Publication Date: 2016-5

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 33-43
• Serial:
  • Transportation Research Part B: Methodological
  • Volume: 87
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0191-2615
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01912615

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Adaptive control; Bunching; Bus transit operations; Headways
• Uncontrolled Terms: Bus holding strategies
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01598173
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Apr 15 2016 12:14PM