Development of an Algorithm for Minimization of Passengers’ Waiting Time Using Smart Card Data

Bus headway plays an important role not only in determining the passenger waiting time and bus service quality, but also in influencing the bus operation cost and passenger demand. Previous research on headway control has considered only an hourly difference in the distribution of ridership between peak and non-peak hours. However, this approach is too simple to help manage ridership demand fluctuations in a short time scale; thus passengers’ waiting cost will be generated when ridership demand exceeds the supply of bus services. Moreover, bus ridership demand varies by station location and traffic situation. To address this concern, we propose a headway control algorithm for minimizing the waiting time cost by using Smart Card data. We also provide proof of the convergence of the algorithm to the desired headway allocation using a set of preconditions of political waiting time guarantees and available fleet constraints. For model verification, the data from the No. 143 bus line in Seoul were used. The results show that the total savings in cost totaled approximately 600,000 won per day when we apply the time-value cost of waiting time. Thus, we can expect that cost savings will be more pronounced when the algorithm is applied to larger systems.