Combinatorial Optimization of Multiple Buses Docking at BRT Station with Multiple Sub-stops and Docking Bays for Guangzhou BRT system

摘要

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system is becoming a popular public transport system to mitigate urban traffic congestion. Despite its booming growth, many researches on improving its performance and operations are still in their infancy. Reasonably and accurately assigning multiple docking bays and sub-stops for different bus routes at the station to ensure effective and efficient BRT operation management is a great challenge. In Guangzhou BRT (GRBT) system, bus bunching or queuing at stations is the major cause of traffic congestion which reduces the quality of service and lowers operation management level. This study is motivated by the urgent need to change such a situation. The study firstly proposes a combinatorial optimization model to assign multiple sub-stops and docking bays for different bus routes at the station (BCOM). The objective of the proposed method is to minimize the probability of bus queuing at BRT station. And then, a novel genetic algorithm (NGA) to obtain the suboptimal solution of BCOM is put forward. After that, we analyze the operating data from GBRT system. Finally, a simulation tool for GBRT system based on VISSIM (GBRTSM) has been developed to evaluate the proposed solution. The simulation and application results demonstrated that the proposed solution can decrease bus queuing length at GBRT station effectively, and reduce the service saturation of sub-stop, bus dwell time and travel time simultaneously. Our research provides a useful and practical solution for improving performance and operations of GBRT system, ensuring effective and efficient GBRT system operation management.