Integrating Bus Holding Control Strategies and Schedule Recovery: Simulation-Based Comparison and Recommendation

Abstract

In the absence of control strategies, headway fluctuation and bus bunching are commonly observed in transit operation due to the stochastic attributes such as travel time and passenger demand. Existing research on real-time control largely focused on developing operational tactics to maintain bus arrival regularity at stops without fully considering the effect of schedule recovery. This paper investigates the effect of bus driver behavior on bus holding control strategies and more specifically their effort in catching up with schedule in case of delay, i.e., schedule recovery. To this end, this paper first proposes a bus propagation model with capacity constraint to simulate the evolution of bus trajectories along a fixed route. It proceeds to explicitly incorporate both holding control actions and schedule recovery effect into the bus propagation model. Using simulation for a high-frequency bus line in Guangzhou, China, schedule- (SH) and headway-based holding (HH) control strategies are compared under various operational settings in the context of schedule recovery. These comparisons show that SH performs better under certain conditions, and SH generally benefits more from schedule recovery than HH. These results provide insights into the bus stop layout design and implementation of holding methods in the context of cruising guidance.

Analysis and Simulation of Intervention Strategies against Bus Bunching by means of an Empirical Agent-Based Model

“…While the two previous strategies deal with the buses' interaction with passengers, this intervention involves the intrinsic behaviors of the buses. Similar to speed change control [42] or schedule recovery [21] schemes, the strategy involves actuating each bus to either speed up or to slow down, based on their current headway. Specifically, each bus with a backward time-headway greater than the equal timeheadway state of h * t � H t /N will be forced to slow down, and buses with h t < H t /N will be sped up.…”

“…Bus bunching occurs when the distance between two or more buses reduces to near zero. In traffic studies [1][2][3][4][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], bus bunching is often examined through the headway between two buses, i.e., the forward distance or time of a vehicle to its leading vehicle. Bunching occurs naturally as a consequence of the interaction between buses and passengers [2,4,5] after discounting the effects of other traffic.…”

Simulation-based robust optimization of limited-stop bus service with vehicle overtaking and dynamics: A response surface methodology

“…In practice, there exist large amounts of uncertainties in vehicle travel time due to traffic congestion, bad weather, etc. (Yao et al, 2014;Wu et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2018). To increase the operational accuracy, a handful of works have considered stochastic travel time in the design of limitedstop service at the planning level.…”

Sensitivity Analysis of Fleet Size for Dynamic Headway-Based Control Method Performance in terms of Passengers’ Experience

“…With the advent of new technologies, some holding strategies have been proposed to take advantage of real-time information so as to reduce passengers' waiting times [3][4][5][6]. Using real-time information, many headway-based holding strategies have been proposed to adaptively control the system [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. A "twoway-looking control" bus headway control method was proposed by Daganzo [14].…”