Mitigating Overflow of Stopping BRT Buses: A Platoon-Based Scheduling Approach Accounting for Line-Specific Berths

For elevated BRT stations without overtaking lanes, the overflow of stopping BRT buses takes place frequently, which causes additional delays and extra energy consumptions to public transport corporations. To this end, a platoon-based scheduling approach accounting for line specific-berths is put forward for BRT with elevated busway to remedy overflow. First of all, a line-specific berth assignment is formulated as an optimal problem, aiming to minimize the deviations of bus flow among berths, with the constraint of more services accommodated by frontmost berth than that by back berth. Besides, to ensure that bus flow at other berths can join the platoon leading by the one at frontmost berth, a virtual platoon is formulated by minimizing deviations of frequency-based dispatch time. Finally, a platoon-based scheduling approach is developed to regulate the frequency-based dispatch time by minimizing dispatch time adjustments, such that the BRT bus platoon can be formulated with inter-platoon time headway greater than the given dwell time threshold. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can greatly reduce overflow probability of stopping BRT buses.