01697792

Component

Traditional bus bunching control methods (e.g., adding slack to schedules, adapting cruising speed), in one way or another, trade commercial speed for better system stability and as a result may impose the burden of additional travel time on passengers. Recently, a dynamic bus substitution strategy, where standby buses are dispatched to take over service from late/early buses, was proposed as an attempt to enhance system reliability without sacrificing too much passenger experience. This paper further studies this substitution strategy in the context of multiple bus lines, where the fleet of standby buses can be shared across multiple lines, and needs to be strategically positioned at a few parking locations. The authors model the agency’s substitution decisions and standby bus pre-positioning decisions as a stochastic dynamic program so as to obtain the optimal policy that minimizes the system-wide costs. Numerical results show that the dynamic substitution strategy can benefit from the “economies of scale” by pooling the standby fleet across lines. A real-world example is also presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed strategy. The substitution strategy not only holds the promise to outperform traditional holding methods in terms of reducing passenger costs, but they also can be used to complement other methods to better control very unstable systems.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB00 Section - Travel Analysis Methods.

19-05929

English

22p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Bunching; Bus lines; Case studies; Costs; Decision making; Fleet management; Schedules and scheduling; Stochastic programming; Waiting time

Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-05929

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:37AM