Modifying the service patterns of public transport vehicles to account for the COVID-19 capacity

As public transport operators try to resume their services, they have to operate under reduced capacities due to COVID-19. Because demand can exceed capacity at different areas and across different times of the day, drivers have to refuse passenger boardings at specific stops. Towards this goal, many public transport operators have modified their service routes by avoiding to serve stops with high passenger demand at specific times of the day. Given the urgent need to develop decision support tools that can prevent the overcrowding of vehicles, this study introduces a dynamic integer nonlinear program that proposes service patterns to individual vehicles that are ready to be dispatched. In addition to the objective of satisfying the imposed vehicle capacity due to COVID-19, the proposed service pattern model caters for the waiting time of passengers. The model is tested in a bus line connecting the university of Twente with its surrounding cities demonstrating the improvement in terms of vehicle overcrowding, and analyzing the potential negative effects related to unserved passenger demand and excessive waiting times.

• Record URL:
  https://annualmeeting.mytrb.org/OnlineProgram/Details/15905
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP015 Standing Committee on Transit Capacity and Quality of Service.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Gkiotsalitis, Konstantinos
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
• Date: 2021

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 20p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus stops; Bus transit; Communicable diseases; COVID-19; Demand; Dispatching; Level of service; Mathematical models; Passenger service; Vehicle capacity; Waiting time
• Geographic Terms: Twente (Netherlands : Province)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Security and Emergencies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01764093
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-02294
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 4 2021 10:57AM