Integrating bus holding control strategies and schedule recovery: Simulation-based comparison and recommendation

In the absence of control strategies, headway fluctuation and bus bunching are commonly observed in transit operation due to the stochastic attributes such as travel time and passenger demand. Existing research on real-time control largely focused on developing operational tactics to maintain bus arrival regularity at stops without fully considering the effect of schedule recovery. This paper investigates the effect of bus driver behaviour on bus holding control strategies, and more specifically their effort in catching up with schedule in case of delay, i.e. schedule recovery. To this end, this paper first proposes a bus propagation model with capacity constraint to simulate the evolution of bus trajectories along a fixed route. It proceeds to explicitly incorporate both holding control actions and schedule recovery effect into the bus propagation model. Using simulation for a high frequency bus line in Guangzhou, China, schedule- (SH) and headway-based holding (HH) control strategies are compared under various operational settings in the context of schedule recovery. These comparisons show that, SH performs better under certain conditions, and SH generally benefits more from schedule recovery than HH. These results provide insights into the bus stop layout design and implementation of holding methods in the context of cruising guidance.