Abstracto

Adaptive Bus Routing Heuristics for Improving Vehicle Utilization and Reducing Commuter Waiting Times

S.R. Subramanya

Millions of people in cities around the world, especially in the developing and underdeveloped countries, depend on the (intra–city) public bus system to get to work and back home. In most cases, the system is strained – there are demands for more buses and routes than available. This has led to increased waiting times of the commuters. Also, since the routes are ‘static’, this might lead to underutilization of the buses. In this paper, we propose a system which makes use of sensors, and computing and wireless/mobile technologies in the buses and bus stops, and a central scheduler which gathers streaming data from the buses and bus stops and uses heuristics to determine in realtime ‘adaptive’ routes for the buses. These are expected to reduce the waiting times of commuters and increase the utilization of the buses.