An agent-based model for real-time bus stop-skipping and holding schemes

This paper develops a real-time agent-based simulation model to optimize the dynamic bus stop-skipping and holding schemes. The proposed agent-based simulation model is capable of modeling, scheduling and solving control strategy problems in real-time complex, dynamic and stochastic scenarios of the transport systems. To this end, random bus travel times and passenger arrivals are incorporated in the agent-based model to evaluate the integrated bus operation strategies. Apart from the total costs, the performance of the proposed strategies is evaluated with respect to the buses' headway deviation and reliability index, the passengers' travel time and the overall system cost, respectively. The results show the benefits of different strategies under different scenarios. The RTSSH (real-time stop-skipping and holding) strategy performs the best when buses are not reused, whilst RTSS (real-time stop-skipping) outperforms RTSSH strategy when buses are allowed to be reused.