A Bus Real Time Co-ordination Model: An application to the City of Lisbon

Francisco Simões de Almeida

Key information

Authors:

Francisco Simões de Almeida (Francisco Simões de Almeida Cruz)

Supervisors:

Luís Miguel Garrido Martinez (Luís Miguel Garrido Martinez); José Manuel Caré Baptista Viegas (José Manuel Caré Baptista Viegas)

Published in

11/24/2012

Abstract

The main goal of this dissertation is to implement a new method to reduce transfer times, by increasing the real-time co-ordination between vehicles, minimising the impacts that these operations may have in others users' journeys. This was achieved through a new approach of real time co-ordination implemented in an Agent-Based formulation. The city of Lisbon was selected as test bed of the developed model. Data from bus operation (vehicles location and ticketing records) was aggregated, matched and treated in order to build a transfer flow matrix. This enabled the generation of an origin-destination matrix between real bus stops that served as inputs of the simulation model. The developed procedure starts by generating services and demand in real time, over which the co-ordination of services, both in space and time, is assessed. The evaluation process was based on an objective function that defines whether the system will gain, or not, with the co-ordination process, guaranteeing a minimum level of service. In case of a positive outcome the process was activated, accelerating and decelerating the affected services. A final analysis is formulated to evaluate the demand increase with a co-ordinate system on the users’ attractiveness. The final value shows an increase of the attractiveness of 3.4% of bus mode compared to the other alternatives and an induced demand value of 11,636 passengers if a co-ordination method had been implemented.