Toward real-time multi-criteria decision making for bus service reliability optimization

This paper addresses issues associated with the real-time control of public transit operations to minimize passenger wait time: namely vehicle headway, maintenance of passenger comfort, and reducing the impact of control strategies. The randomness of passenger arrivals at bus stops and external factors (such as traffic congestion and bad weather) in high frequency transit operations often cause irregular headway that can result in decreased service reliability. The approach proposed in this paper, which has the capability of handling the uncertainty of transit operations based on Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm using a dynamic Bayesian network, applies preventive strategies to forestall bus unreliability and, where unreliability is evident, restore reliability using corrective strategies. "Holding", "expressing", "shortturning" and "deadheading" are the corrective strategies considered in this paper.