Service reliability is often considered only at the operational management phase, while services are assumed to be perfectly reliable at the strategic and tactical planning phases. However, service (un)reliability has consequences on the effective frequency and thus on deficiencies in capacity allocation and passenger waiting times and on-board comfort.

Determining the dispatching headways of bus services in a city network is a multi-criteria problem that typically involves balancing between passenger demand coverage and operational costs.

Together with Costas Gkiotsalitis from NEC Labratories Europe, we develop and apply a reliability-based optimization framework for setting the dispatching headways of bus lines that considers historical operational data and is aware of the passenger waiting time variability at each stop and how it is affected when changing the planned dispatching headways.

Check out the full paper published on Transportation Research Part C – Emerging Technologies following this link

We hope that this work will contribute to a new generation of tactical planning methods that account for service uncertainty.