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Project

Flexible bus services in smart cities

Currently, most public bus systems offer almost the same service all day long, even when the demand clearly changes throughout the day. This is rather rigid and inefficient. However, in the near future, in many ‘smart cities’, it will be possible both for potential passengers to explicitly state their destination, requested arrival time, etc., and for a bus operator to communicate bus arrival times and other information in real-time to its passengers and drivers. This allows to make public bus services much more flexible and efficient.Therefore, in this project, we focus on making bus services flexible by allowing on-line changes to the routes, stops and timetable. We develop mathematical models and optimization techniques to fully exploit the opportunities of two of such flexibility options. Then, we will evaluate under which circumstances these options should be considered for simulated case studies from practice, now and in the future. The goal is to obtain a more efficient, flexible and demand oriented public bus system.
Date:1 Oct 2019 →  30 Sep 2023
Keywords:flexible bus services, bus line planning, smart cities, public transport optimization, operations research
Disciplines:Infrastructure, transport and mobility engineering not elsewhere classified