A macroscopic model for integrating bus signal priority with vehicle rescheduling

Abstract

When a bus breaks down on a scheduled trip, one or more vehicles need to be rescheduled to serve that trip and other scheduled trips. A bus breakdown certainly delays the trip being served by the disabled bus and possibly delays or cancels other trips. The vehicle rescheduling problem (VRSP) is to reassign and reschedule the bus fleet to minimize the sum of operating costs, delay costs, schedule disruption costs, and trip cancellation costs. Bus operations may also be improved by bus signal priority (BSP), which can reduce bus delays at signalized intersections. If BSP is provided to the backup bus that travels to service the disabled bus' passengers, it may reach the breakdown point more quickly. However, other buses that also pass through the corresponding intersections may be affected by signal priority. Therefore, a tradeoff must be made so that the backup bus can travel faster while other buses are not significantly delayed. A macroscopic model that integrates bus signal priority with bus rescheduling is proposed in this paper. Computational results show that the combination of BSP and VRSP effectively reduces the delay of the backup bus and decreases the delay costs.

Passenger number dependent traffic control in signalized intersections

“…Formerly, the passive actions were generally used. Nowadays, the active priority measures are rather applied [5,6,11]. There are four commonly used active actions that a traffic controller can perform in response to the detection of a public transport vehicle: extension of the green interval in the current stage, ending another stage earlier to give an early green to the vehicle, inserting an extra stage to allow the vehicle to pass before returning to the regular signal plan and stage rotation to attain the priority stage earlier.…”

Transit priority lanes in the congested road networks

“…The priority of mobility has to be given to people rather than vehicles. Hence, providing priority to transit mode in terms of road space (Mesbah et al, 2011b) and signal time is of interest to practitioners as well as academia (Bagherian et al, 2015;Diab and El-Geneidy, 2013;Guler and Menendez, 2015;Mirchandani et al, 2010). In this study, we aim to address optimal reallocation of road space to transit mode on an existing urban transport network.…”