01626116

Component

Frequency setting constitutes the main activity in the tactical planning of public transport operations. Allocating frequencies of bus services in a city network is a multi-criteria problem that typically considers the operational costs, the passenger demand coverage and the service reliability. In this study, the tactical frequency setting problem is formulated with the explicit consideration of operational variability issues for mitigating the adverse effects of demand and travel time variations experienced during bus operations. The proposed bus frequency setting model considers the demand, headway and travel time variations at every section of each bus route for different times of the day, as well as operational costs and fleet size constraints. The authors formulate the problem as a non-linear discrete programming problem with non-linearity also in the constraints and introduce a solution method based on Branch and Bound and Sequential Quadratic Programming. The performance of the proposed approach is tested using data from seventeen central bus lines in Stockholm. Experimental results demonstrate (a) the improvement potential of the base case allocated frequencies; (b) the sensitivity of different criteria, such as passenger demand coverage, to frequency allocation changes and (c) the accuracy of the proposed solution method compared to heuristic approaches.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP050 Standing Committee on Bus Transit Systems.

01618707

17-01871

English

17p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Branch and bound algorithms; Bus transit operations; Demand; Nonlinear programming; Optimization; Travel time

Travel time variability

Stockholm (Sweden)

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

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-01871

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 10:39AM