Simulation-Based Sensitivity Analysis for Evaluating Factors Affecting Bus Service Reliability: A Big and Smart Data Implementation

Service quality is a significant concern for both providers and users of public transportation. It is crucial for transit agencies to clearly recognize the causes of unreliability before adapting any improvement strategy. However, evaluation of main causes of bus service unreliability has not been investigated well. Existing studies have three main limitations in context of recognizing causes of service unreliability. First, public transport networks and traffic condition are highly complex systems and most of the existing models are not capable to accurately determine the relationship between service irregularity and impact factors. Second, definition of “Big data” has been neglected and most of the studies only focused on one source of large scale data set to determine the causes of unreliability. Third, bus service unreliability can impact the users' perception toward the public transport, significantly. It has been recommended by number of studies that bus service reliability should be evaluated from both service providers' and users' perspective. However, the impact of service unreliability from passengers' perception is not well investigated, yet. Consequently, we proposed a novel simulation-based sensitivity analysis to evaluating main causes of bus service unreliability using a combination of three different sources of big data. Moreover, for the first time we developed a simulation model in R studio which is an open source and powerful coding environment. According to the results, the level of reliability in Route U32 showed the highest sensitivity to headway variations. Waiting time can be decreased by 61% if only bus operators can reduce the headway variation by 25% of the actual observed data. Big gap and bus bunching could be almost disappeared by decreasing headway variations. Moreover, the terminal departure policy could significantly improve the passenger waiting time. Waiting time can be decreased by 36% when almost all the buses depart the terminal on-time.