A Hybrid Real-Time Bus Control Strategy with a Multi-Criterion Evaluation

Real-time control of buses can prevent bus vehicles from chaotic operation due to stochastic features of traffic flow. This paper proposed a hybrid real-time station control strategy combining holding and skipping control. The proposed model can determine when, where and how the strategy implements based on the threshold ratio of headways and dispatch intervals. A simulation experiment is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy compared with no control situation. Five evaluation indexes are aggregated to obtain the optimal key parameters for holding and skipping. The two scenarios whose weights tend to passengers or bus operation agencies respectively shows the same consequence: the optimal key parameter for holding is 0.7, and that for skipping is 2.0 or 3.0. The improvement percentages of the multi-criterion evaluation index are 11.43 and 8.46% which indicates satisfied results.