Two-Way Cooperative Priority Control of Bus Transit with Stop Capacity Constraint

Abstract

Signal priority control and speed guidance are effective ways to reduce the delay of buses at intersections. Previous work generally focused on the optimization strategy at the intersection area, without simultaneously considering the influence on adjacent downstream bus stops. This probably leads to the size of the passed bus platoon exceeding the capacity of berths and queuing, which in turn causes additional delay to the overall bus travel time. Focusing on this problem, this paper proposes a two-way cooperative control strategy that constrains the size of the upstream platoon. Besides this, to avoid bus bunching, no more than two buses from the same route can be admitted in the same platoon. Based on these principles, we modeled how to make buses pass without stopping by simultaneously considering the signal control and speed guidance. Finally, the effectiveness was validated by simulation in Verkehr in Städten Simulation (VISSIM, German for “Traffic in cities—simulation”), a microscopic traffic simulator. The results show that compared to the existing methods, which only use signal control, the cooperative strategy reduces the total delay at the intersection and the downstream stop. It alleviates the queuing phenomenon at the downstream bus stop greatly, and the bus arrivals tend to be more uniform, which helps improve the reliability and sustainability of bus services.

A Comprehensive Survey and Future Directions on Optimising Sustainable Urban Mobility

“…Luo and Yang [160] selected roads for restoration to provide quick disaster response, Bi et al [83] developed reward mechanisms to improve travel and energy efficiency of a road transportation network by establishing a task recommendation system, and to prepare urban transport systems for long-term disasters [94]. For multimodal networks considering both bus and car traffic, Khoo et al [190] studied the implementation of exclusive bus lanes and its period of operation, Li et al [47] focused on bus scheduling and fuel surcharges, Haitao et al [173] proposed a strategy to provide public transport priority in the perimeter of urban networks, and Gao et al [70] focused on traffic lights operation, aiming at providing bus priority on arterial roads. At last, for a multimodal network to integrate buses to the rail system, Almasi et al [196] focused on network design (routes), frequencies setting, and operational aspects (dwell time).…”

“…For multi-objective or multi level problems, the most frequent combination of functions was minimising passenger's travel time and operators' costs. Nevertheless, the whole range of functions aimed at: minimising costs or maximising revenue [53,63,67,83,89,94,110,148,150,164,179,186,[194][195][196]199], minimising unsatisfied demand costs [110,196] and user costs to access the service [199], maximising covered demand or ridership [52,62,76,78,153], maximising accessibility [148] and network fairness [53], and minimising distances [78], fleet size [169], vehicle's transportation time [82], passengers' waiting time [63,79,82,169], passengers' travel time [51,90,169,193,194], vehicle mileage [193], energy consumption [79], vulnerability [51], intersection delay [70], train infeasibility [63] and train delay [172]. Lastly, only two studies considered all the three perspe...…”

A cooperative control method combining signal control and speed control for transit with connected vehicle environment

“…To shorten the travel time of bus rapid transit (BRT), the selection of the dual station of BRT, green light time and cycle time of the intersection are optimized in [28]. Considering the capacity of adjacent bus stops, authors establish cooperative priority control through signal control and speed guidance [29]. In [30], the authors analyse various control strategies by integrating holding time, signal timings, and transit speed according to different arrival conditions.…”

Improving schedule adherence based on dynamic signal control and speed guidance in connected bus system

“…Besides bus holding strategies, transit signal priority (TSP) is also one of the most promising and effective options to improve the reliability of transit systems. Gao et al (2020) proposed a method to improve the reliability of bus services by signal priority control and speed guidance, considering the size of the upstream platoon and stop capacity constraint. Estrada et al (2016) developed a new dynamic bus control strategy based on real-time bus tracking data at stops.…”