Two-Way Cooperative Priority Control of Bus Transit with Stop Capacity Constraint

Abstract

Signal priority control and speed guidance are effective ways to reduce the delay of buses at intersections. Previous work generally focused on the optimization strategy at the intersection area, without simultaneously considering the influence on adjacent downstream bus stops. This probably leads to the size of the passed bus platoon exceeding the capacity of berths and queuing, which in turn causes additional delay to the overall bus travel time. Focusing on this problem, this paper proposes a two-way cooperative control strategy that constrains the size of the upstream platoon. Besides this, to avoid bus bunching, no more than two buses from the same route can be admitted in the same platoon. Based on these principles, we modeled how to make buses pass without stopping by simultaneously considering the signal control and speed guidance. Finally, the effectiveness was validated by simulation in Verkehr in Städten Simulation (VISSIM, German for “Traffic in cities—simulation”), a microscopic traffic simulator. The results show that compared to the existing methods, which only use signal control, the cooperative strategy reduces the total delay at the intersection and the downstream stop. It alleviates the queuing phenomenon at the downstream bus stop greatly, and the bus arrivals tend to be more uniform, which helps improve the reliability and sustainability of bus services.