Combination of speed adjustment and holding control strategy for a regularity-based transit operation

Abstract

As the population grows, the need for mobility has been growing in recent years. In the case of urban mobility, this trend is subsequently followed by the existence of high-frequency bus transit service since last decades. This service is more prone to the bus-bunching problem since the headway between the consecutive buses can be very short, and the passenger demand is typically higher. It becomes very important to keep the service reliability in an adequate state. Applying a headway-based control strategy is an alternative to obtain an efficient and reliable high-frequency bus operation.
Different issues could be found before applying control strategy in a transit system. In the early stage, selection on which control to apply can be dilemmatic. Among different category of control strategies, holding control is the preferable one to mitigate the irregularity problem. However, there are several contrary arguments on this and stating that speed adjustment as a form of “holding”, could obtain a better impact on passengers. Once the strategy is chosen, another issue might appear during the strategy development. To whose perspective the control strategy has to be built. Most attention is usually given to the passenger, while the others are given less attention. Drivers and network impact are the two factors that are often ruled out, even though both are important in determining the performance of control strategy during the implementation. While the attention is all concentrated to yield high serviceability, the practicality is usually forgotten.
Depart from these problems. Thus, the goal of this study is to develop a headway control strategy based on a combination of several measures and to evaluate it from a practical point of view.