Year: 1982
Type: article
Abstract: This paper describes a simulation study of a demand bus system for Tsukuba Science City. The demand bus system is especially for the transportation poor in the daytime. and is fully computerized. Input of demands by customers and information exchange between the control center and buses are performed at bus stops linked to the center through telephone lines. The residential districts and commercial districts are scattered in the system area of 3km×10km. For the simulation many bus stops in these districts are represented by 11 points, and based on traffic studies number of demands is set to the range of 10/h to 1000/h, and number of buses 1 to 50. After giving the numbers of demands and buses the simulation proceeds by tracing generation of demands, allocation and dispatch of a bus to a new demand and, if any bus stops at a bus stop, passengers' getting on and/or off at each discretized time. Then, characteristics of the system under steady state are considered, and relations between system parameters (number of buses, number of demands per unit time) and system characteristics such as level-of service, which is defined as a ratio of wait time plus ride time to direct ride time, customers' wait time at bus stops and maximum number of passengers in a bus are obtained. The heuristic algorithm is applied for allocation and dispatch of buses to demands, and a new type of the performance index for allocation and dispatch is proposed. The results show that the demand bus system is superior to the conventional bus system in respect to both level-of service and wait time, and that the demand bus system is effective in the present city.
Authors: Sadayuki TSUGAWA, Kiyoko SHIGETA
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2321603473