Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 313518, 13 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/313518
Research Article

An Improved Model for Headway-Based Bus Service Unreliability Prevention with Vehicle Load Capacity Constraint at Bus Stops

Weiya Chen,1,2 Chunhua Yang,1 Fenling Feng,2 and Zhiya Chen2

1School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
2School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China

Received 29 September 2012; Revised 22 November 2012; Accepted 27 November 2012

Academic Editor: Wuhong Wang

Copyright © 2012 Weiya Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents an improved model for improving headway-based bus route service reliability at bus stops using real-time preventive operation control, taking into account dynamic interaction among random passenger demand, stochastic driving conditions of route segments, and vehicle load capacity constraint. In this model, the real-time information of passenger demand and vehicle operation is involved to predict the imminent unacceptable headway deviation, in the case of which some in-time preventive control strategies are deployed according to the given control rules. As a case study, a single fixed bus route with high-frequency services was simulated and different scenarios of real-time preventive operation control were performed. Headway adherence and average passenger wait time were used to measure bus service reliability. The results show that the improved model is closer to the real bus route service, and using real-time information to predict potential service unreliability and trigger in-time preventive control can reduce bus bunching and avoid big gap.