California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report describes a simulation model developed to evaluate the impact of using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for bus tracking, on controlling buses in wide-area transit networks. Control strategies with ITS will be compared against those without ITS (i.e., they do not rely on communication or tracking). The model is developed using a general-purpose simulation language, AweSim (Pritsker, 1997). The simulation model is generic and independent of any dedicated transit network. The model has high flexibility and can be used to simulate different kinds of transit networks with varying numbers of bus lines and different travel patterns. The user has the flexibility to input the appropriate control strategy at each bus stop. With this approach an identical replica of an actual system can be simulated. A set of experiments is being developed to analyze the use of ITS on several performance metrics, including average bus arrival and departure lateness, average passenger trip time, and average total passenger waiting time.