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Modelling travel time distribution and its influence over stochastic vehicle scheduling

    Yindong Shen Affiliation
    ; Jia Xu Affiliation
    ; Xianyi Wu Affiliation
    ; Yudong Ni Affiliation

Abstract

Due to the paucity of well-established modelling approaches or well-accepted travel time distributions, the existing travel time models are often assumed to follow certain popular distributions, such as normal or lognormal, which may lead to results deviating from actual ones. This paper proposes a modelling approach for travel times using distribution fitting methods based on the data collected by Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems. By this proposed approach, a compound travel time model can be built, which consists of the best distribution models for the travel times in each period of a day. Applying to stochastic vehicle scheduling, the influence of different travel time models is further studied. Results show that the compound model can fit more precisely to the actual travel times under various traffic situations, whilst the on-time performance of resulting vehicle schedules can be improved. The research findings have also potential benefit for the other research based on travel time models in public transport including timetabling, service planning and reliability measurement.

Keyword : public transit, travel time, distribution fitting, stochastic vehicle scheduling, AVL data

How to Cite
Shen, Y., Xu, J., Wu, X., & Ni, Y. (2019). Modelling travel time distribution and its influence over stochastic vehicle scheduling. Transport, 34(2), 237-249. https://doi.org/10.3846/transport.2019.8940
Published in Issue
Mar 21, 2019
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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