Modeling bus bunching: A comprehensive approach accounting for transit demand and traffic flows

摘要

Headway fluctuations and bus bunching are commonly observed phenomena in transit operations. In this article, we extend the fast traffic flow solver previously proposed for simulating moving bottlenecks to account for transit demand and traffic flows together. The buses are treated as moving bottlenecks in the traffic flow as their dynamics are affected by surrounding traffic, and vice versa. The dynamics of passengers are integrated to reproduce buses operations. Thanks to a semi-analytical approach, we are able to simulate some important aspects of real-life corridors, such as the buses obstructive effect on the surrounding traffic flow, and the environmental traffic effects to the bus bunching phenomenon and passenger waiting time. One can expect that this simulation framework can be employed for transit operation optimization problems where fast and accurate solutions are required.