A Real-time Bus Traveling Speed Optimization Model for Reducing Bus Delay and CO2 Emission in Connected Vehicle Environment

Public transportation plays an important part in sustainable motorization and urbanization. This research presents a novel bus speed operation strategy to reduce bus delay and CO2 emission within connected vehicle environment. Most previous work merely focuses on optimization of signal timings to decrease bus signal delay by assuming that the speed of buses is given as a constant input and the acceleration and deceleration processes of buses can be neglected. This paper explores the benefits of bus speed control strategy to minimize the total cost that includes bus signal delay and bus travel delay caused by adjusting speed due to frequent stops and intense driving. A set of formulations are developed to capture the benefits of bus speed control. Experimental analyses have shown that the proposed model outperforms the traditional control strategy in terms of reducing average bus delay and CO2 emission.