Modeling the effects of integrated bus drivers' schedule recovery and holding control strategy on the bus route schedule design

The bus route schedule design (BRSD) aims to generate the bus departure times at the predetermined timing points along the bus route, in which the uncertainty of bus travel times and certain operational strategy are considered to determine the amount of slack time allocated to each segment between two adjacent timing points. In this paper we proposes a cost-based expected value model for investigating the effects of integrated bus drivers' schedule recovery and holding control strategy (IBHS) on the BRSD. The proposed model allows a trade-off among various cost components associated with the planned bus schedule. Then, a Monte Carlo simulation based solution method is designed to solve the proposed model. Finally, an illustrative example is used to show the application of the proposed model and the effectiveness of IBHS. The findings show that IBHS outperforms the only holding control strategy (HCS) widely used in the literature in the terms of the total system cost (i.e., the sum of various cost components associated with the optimal bus schedule), and the effects of IBHS on the optimal slack time allocated to the bus route and various cost components are also explored.