Sensitivity Analysis of Fleet Size for Dynamic Headway-Based Control Method Performance in terms of Passengers’ Experience

The headway-based control method is usually used to regulate the bus headways to improve the bus operation. However, these control methods only focus on equalizing bus headways, neglecting analysis for STD (standard deviation) of passengers on the buses. Therefore, in order to fix this gap, this paper analyzed performance of the control method in terms of regulating bus headways and number of passengers on the buses under variable number of buses on the route. First, as an enhanced version of headways-based control method, a coordinated control method based on the self-equalizing bus headways concept involving bus holding and stop-skipping is proposed. A discrete system is formulated to describe the bus operation, and the coordinated control method is imbedded into it. In order to reflect the performance in regulating bus headways and the number of passengers, two indexes are formulated, respectively. Finally, a set of numerical analysis was conducted. The test results showed that the regulated bus headways can make the number of passengers on buses equalized. As a by-product, the headway-based control method can make the bus capacity be well utilized by equalizing bus headways on the bus route.