Study on dynamic influence of passenger flow on intelligent bus travel service model

Abstract

To improve the service quality and convenience of bus travel services, this paper proposes the Intelligent Bus Travel Service Model (IBTSM). The IBTSM makes it possible to provide a travel strategy considering every aspect of bus travel, specifically, delay in the peak period arising from limited carrying-capacities of buses. A three-step approach was executed toward implementing the IBTSM. First, the bus travel-time was predicted using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Next, the crowding level in the bus was evaluated using a fuzzy expert system, based on which a reasonable start-off time was planned, and the delay caused by large passenger flow was circumvented. The k-Nearest Neighbours (k-NN) algorithm was used to provide input data of passenger flow. In this study, the correlation between passenger flow variation and bus services was investigated to extend the provisions of the travel strategy to include start-off time scheduling and target bus selection, rather than only bus running-time estimation. The proposed model was evaluated using a bus in China as a case study, and its reliability and positive impact on promoting both the quality of bus services and development of intelligent travel were demonstrated.