Estimation of bus travel time incorporating dwell time for APTS applications

Congestion has become a serious problem in the context of urban transport around the world. As more and more vehicles are being introduced into the urban streets every year, the mode share of the public transportation sector is declining at an alarming rate. Particularly in developing countries, more people have moved to personalized mode since it is becoming easily affordable and the quality of service offered by the public transit is not improving. To attract more people, the public transit should provide a high level of quality service to the passengers. One way of achieving this is by using Advanced Public Transport Systems (APTS) applications such as providing accurate real-time bus arrival information to the passengers which will improve the service reliability of the public transit. Travel time prediction has been a well-renowned topic of research for years. However, studies which were model based and incorporating dwell times at bus stops explicitly for heterogeneous traffic conditions are limited. The present study tries to explicitly incorporate the bus stop delays associated with the total travel times of the buses under heterogeneous traffic conditions. This will help in obtaining a reliable algorithm which can be adopted for bus arrival time prediction under Indian conditions. © 2009 IEEE.