Bus Scheduling of Overlapping Routes With Multi-Vehicle Types Based on Passenger OD Data

To mitigate the problems caused by bus route overlap in the transit network, this paper proposes a new scheduling method with both large and small vehicle types based on passenger OD (Origin-Destination) data. The minimum of total cost of passenger travel time and bus company operation is taken as the optimization objective, departure intervals and vehicle types are taken as the optimization variables. The impact of route overlap on passenger travel time is analyzed. A heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the optimization model to produce the departure time and vehicle type for each bus trip. Finally, three real bus routes in Harbin city are taken as an example to validate the proposed model using peak-hour data. Compared with the model without considering route overlap, the proposed model can reduce total passenger travel time and cost by 5.2% and 8.8% respectively.