An Analytic Model for Representing Required Capacity of an Urban Bus Route

To provide a desired service quality and cost effectiveness of urban bus transport service, it needs to solve a series of planning problems including various scheduling problems (e.g., vehicle scheduling, driver scheduling, maintenance scheduling, and so on). An important input of these planning problems is the required capacity to deliver passengers. In this paper, we give its definition and propose an analytic model to represent it. The model is a superposition of three parts. One part deals with the required capacity in off-peak hours and the other two parts represents the required capacities in morning and evening peak hours. A case study is included to illustrate how the model parameters are determined. A comparative analysis between the required and actual capacities is carried out to show the usefulness of the proposed model.