Related papers: Holding strategies in a bus-route model
If a bus line becomes unstable, passengers waiting time will be lengthened and buses capacities will be mismatched. To stabilize a high-frequency bus line, many holding strategies have been proposed. Among these strategies, some need to…
Bus bunching is a curse of transportation systems such as buses in a loop. Here we present an analytical method to find the number of revolutions before two buses bunch in an idealised system, as a function of the initial distance and the…
Technologically driven transport systems are characterized by a networked structure connecting operation centers and by a dynamics ruled by pre-established schedules. Schedules impose serious constraints on the timing of the operations,…
A proper discretization of the logistic differential equation, which is preserving these two distinct equilibrium solutions and their unstability and stability, suggest that we need to examine the time delay of the logistic map. According…
In recent years many studies of urban mobility based on large data sets have been published: most of them based on crowdsourced GPS data or smart-card data. We present, what is to our knowledge the first, exploration of public transport…
Bus bunching is ostensibly regarded as a detrimental phenomenon in bus systems. We study a bus loop with two bus stops, one regular and one spike bus stop, where bunched buses can outperform staggered buses. The spike bus stop models a bus…
Bus bunching is a perennial phenomenon that not only diminishes the efficiency of a bus system, but also prevents transit authorities from keeping buses on schedule. We present a physical theory of buses serving a loop of bus stops as a…
This paper proposes a stochastic framework to evaluate the performance of public transit systems under short random service suspensions. We aim to derive closed-form formulations of the mean and variance of the queue length and waiting…
Buses are known to be an unstable system, and as a result they struggle to stay on schedule and/or to maintain regular headways. In current practice, transit agencies add significant slack to the schedule and hold buses until their…
Service reliability is critical to transit service delivery. This paper describes headway control pilots conducted in two high-ridership Chicago bus routes between 2022 and 2023. A decision support system was developed for a bus holding…
The unreliable service and the unstable operation of a high frequency bus line are shown as bus bunching and the uneven distribution of headways along the bus line. Although many control strategies, such as the static and dynamic holding…
We unveil that a previously-unreported vicious cycle can be created when bus queues form at curbside stops along a corridor. Buses caught in this cycle exhibit growing variation in headways as they travel from stop to stop. Bus (and patron)…
Delays in public transport are common, often impacting users through prolonged travel times and missed transfers. Existing solutions for handling delays remain limited; backup plans based on historical data miss opportunities for earlier…
The paper introduces and evaluates the concept of the dynamic interlining of buses. Dynamic interlining is an operational strategy for routes that have a terminal station at a common hub, that allows a portion of (or all) the fleet to be…
Public transportation systems often suffer from unexpected fluctuations in demand and disruptions, such as mechanical failures and medical emergencies. These fluctuations and disruptions lead to delays and overcrowding, which are…
Time delays are a common perturbation in systems with many states, such as networked, distributed, or decentralized systems. Current methods analyzing the stability of large systems with time delay typically produce very conservative…
It is commonly seen that buses are blocked by the ones in front serving passengers and have to queue outside a curbside bus stop although there are vacant berths at the stop. The resultant bus delays degrade the service level of urban…
The increasing urbanization process we have been witnessing in the last decades is accompanied by a significant increase in traffic congestion in cities around the world. The effect of the congestion is represented in the enormous time…
We study how $N$ intelligent buses serving a loop of $M$ bus stops learn a \emph{no-boarding strategy} and a \emph{holding strategy} by reinforcement learning. The high level no-boarding and holding strategies emerge from the low level…
Human mobility clustering is an important problem for understanding human mobility behaviors (e.g., work and school commutes). Existing methods typically contain two steps: choosing or learning a mobility representation and applying a…