Designing Sustainable Public Transportation: Integrated Optimization of Bus Speed and Holding Time in a Connected Vehicle Environment

Wei Wu, Wanjing Ma, Kejun Long, Heping Zhou and Yi Zhang
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Wei Wu: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410004, China
Wanjing Ma: Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, TongjiUniversity, Shanghai 201804, China
Kejun Long: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410004, China
Heping Zhou: School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410004, China
Yi Zhang: State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 11, 1-15

Abstract: Developing public transportation and giving priority to buses is a feasible solution for improving the level of public transportation service, which facilitates congestion alleviation and prevention, and contributes to urban development and city sustainability. This paper presents a novel bus operation control strategy including both holding control and speed control to improve the level of service of transit systems within a connected vehicle environment. Most previous work focuses on optimization of signal timing to decrease the bus signal delay by assuming that holding control is not applied; the speed of buses is given as a constant input and the acceleration and deceleration processes of buses can be neglected. This paper explores the benefits of a bus operation control strategy to minimize the total cost, which includes bus signal delay, bus holding delay, bus travel delay, acceleration cost due to frequent stops and intense driving. A set of formulations are developed to explicitly capture the interaction between bus holding control and speed control. Experimental analysisand simulation tests have shown that the proposed integrated operational model outperforms the traditional control, speed control only, or holding control only strategies in terms of reducing the total cost of buses. The sensitivity analysis has further demonstrated the potential effectiveness of the proposed approach to be applied in a real-time bus operation control system under different levels of traffic demand, bus stop locations, and speed limits.

Keywords: bus operation control; speed adjustment; holding control; advanced public transit systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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