Assessment of Public Transport Control Systems: A Comparative Analysis of Platforms and a New Platform Architecture

Public transportation systems (PTSs) are complex and dynamic networks that are constantly exposed to disturbances. Many studies focused on the development of public transport control systems (PTCSs) to improve the efficiency of PTSs and ensure acceptable levels of quality of service (QoS). Although the performance of such systems has been analysed and assessed using simulation platforms, there is still a need for a common evaluation platform that allows both benchmarking and assessment of PTCSs based on a set of key performance indicators (KPI). This paper reviews existing simulation platforms and evaluates their ability to assess PTCSs based on a comparative analysis framework. Then, the paper introduces a new platform architecture for the evaluation and benchmarking of public transport control systems. We show that the suggested architecture fills in (at least part of) the gaps of existing platforms.