Abstract:

Autonomous modular buses are emerging intelligent connected transport tools. They can freely couple/decouple during operation to flexibly design bus capacity. In order to make full use of the modular bus flexibility to adapt to spatio-temporal passenger demand, this study proposes a service mode of autonomous modular buses with skip-stop strategy. First, using a discrete time modelling method and the extended-Newell theory, this work establishes the optimization model of modular bus operation with the objective function of passenger travel cost and operator operation cost to determine departure headway, vehicle formulation, and skip-stop scheme, simultaneously. Second, the developed model is used in the case study of bus line 110 in Dandong, China. The obtained results show that compared with the traditional bus system and modular buses with full-stop strategy under peak and off-peak periods, the proposed modular bus service mode with skip-stop strategy will significantly save the system cost of 3.34%-24.65%, where passenger waiting time cost and in-vehicle time cost save 7.49%-48.52% and 2.31%-6.28%, respectively.

Key words: transportation engineering, modular bus, skip-stop strategy, time-varying passenger demand, capacity design