Avoiding bus bunching: From theory to practice

DATE: 
Friday, January 13, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:00pm PST
SPEAKERS: 
Ricardo Giesen, Universidad Catolica Chile
COST: 
Free
CREDIT: 
1

View slides

Watch video:

Avoiding bus bunching: From theory to practice

The problem of bus bunching in a high frequency service has been largely studied in the literature.

This phenomenon is produced by three main factors

(i) the variability in travel time between stops;
(ii) variations in passenger demand; and
(iii) drivers’ heterogeneity.

In order to tackle this phenomenon a wide range of control strategies have been proposed, however, none of them had been successfully implemented on a large transit network with high frequency services.

In this talk, we present a control scheme based on a rolling horizon optimization problem that has been successfully implemented for real-time control of two high frequency services in Santiago, Chile.

Finally, the main results and challenges on the implementation phase are discussed.

Ricardo Giesen is the Director and Associate Professor at the Department of Transport Engineering and Logistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). He received his PhD in Transportation Systems from the University of Maryland College Park in 2007, and before a M.S. in Transportation Engineering in 1998 and a B.S. in Civil and Industrial Engineering in 1995 from the PUC. He specializes in operations of transportation systems, public transit planning and operations, and logistics and distribution optimization.