An Investigation in Real-time Bus Holding Policy

This paper investigates a control strategy of holding a group of buses at a single or multiple control points. By incorporating any possible passenger boarding activities during holding, a single control point problem (P) is developed and extended to multiple control points. The problem (P) is a nonconvex optimization programming with linear constraints that minimizes the total passenger waiting time both on-board and at stops. A heuristic is then developed that is easy and fast to implement, which makes it suitable for real-time implementation. The model is evaluated with simulations of the real-time bus operation data from the Chicago Transit Authority. The simulation results show considering the boarding activities in the total waiting time mitigates the error propagation and stabilizes the holding performance, compared to the common models in the literature, which do not consider boarding while holding.