A predictive-control framework to eliminate bus bunching

Buses not arriving on time and then arriving all at once - this phenomenon is known from busy bus routes and is called bus bunching. This thesis combines the well studied but so far separate areas of bus-bunching prediction and dynamic holding strategies, which allow to modulate buses’ dwell times at stops to eliminate bus bunching. We look at real data of the Dublin Bus route 46A and present a headway-based predictive-control framework considering all components like data acquisition, prediction and control strategies. We formulate time headways as time series and compare several prediction methods for those. Furthermore we present an analytical model of an artificial bus route and discuss stability properties and dynamic holding strategies using both data available at the time and predicted headway data. In a numerical simulation we illustrate the advantages of the presented predictive-control framework compared to the classical approaches which only use directly available data