Simulation of bus dispatching with real-time traffic light scheduling

In the past decades, traffic problem is becoming a worldwide social issue in every city, every country. To examine and find out a suitable solution to improve and upgrade the transportation system and traffic network, thousands of investigations and tests need to be carried out on the road, which not only cost money, but more unbearable impact is the time. Fortunately, Traffic Simulation was approached to evaluate a new solution/ traffic plan without affecting normal traffic. With powerful computing ability and user-friendly interface, traffic simulation helps researches and engineers on simulating the traffic network, shortening the evaluation time with low cost and low risk. It is also able to generate simulation data for further analyzing and review the transportation network. This project focused on the development of traffic simulation by using microscopic traffic simulator software PTV-VISSIM (Version 11). PTV-VISSIM was selected and used to analyze the impacts of different bus dispatch strategies in view of its capability on solving various problems encountered in practice and road traffic development. An external program written in Python was introduced to communicate with the simulation via VISSIM-COM interface. Program is scripted to control the traffic signal controller, assign real-time dynamic traffic flow and extract traffic information. The simulation is developed to model two bus service routes from Boonlay Bus Interchange to Nanyang Technological University Campus, covers 48 related bus stops in the traffic network. Result was Evaluated on Bus travel time, passenger waiting time by comparing two bus dispatch strategies with real time traffic situation. Simulation with Transit Signal Priority strategy gave a better performance result according to the evaluated data. Future work possibilities proposed including the task of merging the simulation into a large scaled V2X project and simulating with more traffic information.Master of Science (Computer Control and Automation