Mesoscopic Modeling of Bus Public Transportation

Analysis of public transport system performance and level of service in urban areas is essential. Dynamic modeling of traffic conditions, passenger demand, and transit operations is important to represent adequately the complexity of and the interactions between these components in modern public transportation systems. This paper presents a transit simulation model designed to support evaluation of operations planning and control, especially in the context of advanced public transportation systems. Unlike most previous efforts in this area, the simulation model is built on a platform of a mesoscopic traffic simulation model, which allows modeling of the operation dynamics of large-scale transit systems, taking into account the main sources of service uncertainty and stochasticity. The capabilities of Mezzo as an evaluation tool of transit operations are demonstrated with an application to a real-world, high-demand bus line in metropolitan Tel Aviv, Israel, under various scenarios. The application shows that important phenomena such as bus bunching are reproduced realistically. A comparison of simulated running times and headway distributions with field data shows the model is capable of replicating observed data.

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