A Combined Bus Splitting And Holding Strategy to Prevent Bus Bunching Using Autonomous Modular Buses

Abstract

Autonomous modular buses (AMBs) with en-route coupling and decoupling capability can be more effective in preventing bus bunching than strategies available with traditional buses, such as bus-holding and stop-skipping, which suffer from shortcomings. Our previous work introduced bus-splitting, a novel alternative to stop-skipping that directs a modular bus to decouple into individual units when it experiences a longer than normal headway. Despite outperforming stopskipping, bus-splitting alone cannot eliminate bunching completely since it cannot increase short headways. In this work, we propose combining bus-splitting with bus-holding so that headways that are either shorter or longer than required can both be corrected. We use a macroscopic simulation to compare our combined strategy with the original bus-splitting strategy as well as stopskipping (both standalone and combined with bus-holding). We find that the combined strategy outperforms all the others by reducing passengers’ average travel cost and its variation, especially for busy bus lines.