Prediction of Bus Bunching Using Smart Card Data

With the rapid development of economy and society, congestion in cities is increasing and headway for public transport is unstable. Therefore, bus bunching is occurring in the course of bus operation, which leads to unreliable service problems such as increased overall waiting time. Under the premise of the widely used smart card, the research takes a single bus line as the object and studies it with the historical data of the smart card. A real-time model of passengers waiting at bus stops is established based on the data of bus speed and historical data. Moreover, the prediction result is used to predict the bus bunching. This paper will verify the efficiency and feasibility of the model by numerical examples. The study’s results show that the prediction model of bus bunching based on smart card data can predict the condition during bus operation accurately and discover potential problems in time.