Sharing bus lanes: a new lanes multiplexing-based method using a dynamic time slice policy

Abstract

Dedicated bus lanes (DBLs) can only be used by buses in principle, so there is an intermittent waste of road resources. Coupled with increasingly serious traffic congestion, how to fully exploit the relatively surplus road resources of DBLs under the premise of guaranteeing bus priority is an issue that is worth studying. The authors propose a dynamic time slice policy for the time division multiplexing (TDM) method to share dedicated bus lanes. First, the TDM method is outlined to present the basic mechanism of the dynamic time slice policy. Subsequently, models for predicting the travel times of approaching vehicles and lane-borrowing vehicles based on TDM are established. Then, a lane-borrowing discriminative model is proposed to determine whether low-priority vehicles have the right to use the DBL at the current moment, and the time slices of DBL multiplexing are allocated based on vehicles of different types. Furthermore, to increase the operability of the method in engineering applications, a spatiotemporal control strategy for TDM is designed. Finally, the dynamic time slice policy is applied to a DBL through simulations and practical traffic experiments. The results prove the feasibility of the dynamic time slice policy.