Dynamic Multi-Bus Dispatching Strategy With Boarding and Holding Control for Passenger Delay Alleviation and Schedule Reliability: A Combined Dispatching-Operation System

The continuing increase of the on-road private cars is contributing to a deterioration of the urban traffic system. Public transportation is widely used to tackle this issue due to its large ridership. In this paper, we propose a multi-bus dispatching strategy combined with the boarding and holding control (MBDBH) to improve bus utilization and further decrease the passenger excess delay. Dispatching adjustments and operation control are taken into account in the system. At the dispatching level, on the one hand, either a bus platoon or a single bus can be dispatched for each trip to provide adaptive bus capacity to match the highly-fluctuated stop demands, on the other hand, we adjust the bus dispatching time based on the existing timetable to minimize passenger excess waiting time to a large extent. Meanwhile, the operation level incorporates both holding strategy and boarding limit strategy to bring more flexible adjustments in improving bus service. Besides the efficiency, we also minimize the headway variation in order to maintain a high system reliability. The problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINP) problem, which is solved by the commercial solver Gurobi. With the computational complexity as a concern, we propose a distributed algorithm to implement dual decomposition based on the partial Lagrangian relaxation. Finally, numerical examples are investigated to illustrate the significant time reduction of distributed algorithm and the efficiency of our proposed strategy: The proposed MBDBH model can reduce roughly 50% and 30% of remaining passenger volumes when compared with the timetable-based fixed schedule and the optimized single-bus dispatching schedule, respectively.

Automated summary

The paper proposes a multi-bus dispatching strategy combined with the boarding and holding control to optimize bus utilization, decrease passenger excess delay, and maintain high system reliability. The strategy involves adaptive bus capacity, adjusted dispatching time, holding and boarding limit strategies, and minimization of headway variation. Numerical examples show significant time reduction and efficiency improvement compared to traditional fixed schedules.