Accurate predictions of bus arrival times help passengers arrange their trips easily and flexibly and improve travel efficiency. Thus, it is important to manage and schedule the arrival times of buses for the efficient deployment of buses and to ease traffic congestion, which improves the service quality of the public transport system. However, due to many variables disturbing the scheduled transportation, accurate prediction is challenging. For accurate prediction of the arrival time of a bus, this research adopted a recurrent neural network (RNN). For the prediction, the variables affecting the bus arrival time were investigated from the data set containing the route, a driver, weather, and the schedule. Then, a stacked multilayer RNN model was created with the variables that were categorized into four groups. The RNN model with a separate multi-input and spatiotemporal sequence model was applied to the data of the arrival and leaving times of a bus from all of a Shandong Linyi bus route. The result of the model simulation revealed that the convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) model showed the highest accuracy among the tested models. The propagation of error and the number of prediction steps influenced the prediction accuracy.
Real-time vehicle guidance effectively reduces traffic jams and improves the operational efficiency of urban transportation. The trip time on a route is considered as a random process that changes with time, and the shortest path selection requires a random dynamic model and the solution of a decision-making problem. Thus, the shortest trip time is the criterion to determine the dynamic path selection by a random dynamic programming (DP) model which discretizes the trip times in the continuous segments on the route. In this study, a numerical model of random dynamic programming is established by using a probability tree model and an AND/OR (AO∗) algorithm to select the path of the shortest trip time. The results show that the branches of the probability tree are only accumulated on the “quantity” and do not cause a “qualitative” change. The inefficient accumulation of “quantity” affects the efficiency of the algorithm, so it is important to separate the accumulation of “quantity” from node expansion. The accumulation of “quantity” changes the trip time according to the entering time into a segment, which demands an improved AO∗ algorithm. The new AO∗ algorithm balances between efficiency and the trip time and provides the optimal real-time vehicle guidance on the road.
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