A Bus Departure Time Interval Transition Model Considering Traffic Congestion

The existing planning models of bus departure time interval usually ignored the important impact factor of realtime traffic congestion. To solve the issue, a departure time interval transition method is presented considering passenger travel demand and traffic congestion. The bus operating hours is divided into several temporary periods separately according to the passenger travel demand and the congestion conditions by the clustering method of samples with sequence. Then these temporary periods are combined to form a period set, in which each period possess the features including passenger travel flow and traffic congestion. Consequently, the departure interval transition model is established to adjust the transient time separately between two neighbor periods to match the passenger travel demand and departure plan. Finally a practical experiment for one bus route in Hangzhou is implemented to verify the proposed model by PARAMICS simulation. The result shows that the model can keep the load ratio in the range of 40% to 70% with the precondition of satisfying the passenger travel demand, and help to improve the service level and the efficiency of the bus transit system.