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A new transit operating strategy is presented in which service vehicles operate in pairs with the lead vehicle providing an all-stop local service and the following vehicle being allowed to skip some stops as an express service. The underlying scheduling problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem with the objective of minimizing the total costs for both operators and passengers. A sensitivity analysis using a real-life example is performed to identify the conditions under which the proposed operating strategy is most advantageous.

A systematic study is described to address various design and implementation issues associated with the problem of real-time bus holding control. Two holding control models have been investigated. The first model follows the conventional threshold-based control logic that determines holding times on the basis of headway to the preceding bus. The second model makes use of both preceding and following headways in identifying optimal control decisions with the assumption that real-time bus location information is available for estimating future bus arrivals at the control stop. An extensive simulation analysis is performed using a real-fife bus route operated by the Grand River Transit of the region of Waterloo, Ontario. The simulation results have substantiated several conclusions and yielded new findings on various issues such as where to set the control point, how many control points should be used, what is the optimal control strength, and what is the value of real-time location information.

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