A New Approach to Waiting Time and Dispatch Frequency Guided Bus Timetable Optimization

The current bus departure time intervals are usually fixed without timely exploring the diversity of passenger flow in various periods, which inevitably leads to a sub-optimal solution to the passenger waiting time and the bus company’s benefit. Therefore, to optimize the bus timetable, we propose a new waiting time and dispatch frequency guided approach, which builds on a new departure time interval expression (DTIE) that simultaneously considers the effects of the fluctuation in passenger flow and the number of bus stops. Specifically, we first construct a vehicle space-time matrix (VSTM) that records the running states of each bus, and then combine the VSTM and real passenger travel data to find the optimal parameters for DTIE, through a simulation experiment searching for the optimal parameters that simultaneously minimize the waiting time and the number of bus dispatched. We evaluate the proposed optimization method on three typical bus lines in Shenzhen, China, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority, in comparison with the bus scheduling scheme currently used by the bus company.