Dynamic extra buses scheduling strategy in public transport

Abstract

This paper presents a dynamic extra buses scheduling strategy to improve the transit service of transit routes. In this strategy, in order to decide when to dispatch an extra bus, the service reliability of transit route is assessed firstly. A model aimed at maximizing the benefit of the extra buses scheduling strategy is constructed to determine how many stops extra buses need to skip from the terminal to accommodate passengers at the following stops. A heuristic algorithm is defined and implemented to estimate the service reliability of transit route and to optimize the initial stop of extra buses scheduling strategy. Finally, the strategy is test- ed on two examples: a simple and a real-life transit route in the Dalian city in China. The results show that the extra buses scheduling strategy based on terminal stops with a reasonable threshold can save 8.01% waiting time of passengers.