Load-sensitive bus headway control for reducing onboard passenger waiting time

Regularity in the bus schedule on low frequency lines or the maintenance of headways on high frequency lines are desired in the operation of public transportation. Bus holding is a technique used for this purpose, but it may incur in delays for onboard passengers. Previous work based on a predictive control method identified a better performance when the holding actions were concentrated in stations where the buses were emptier. Based on these results, the forward headway and the two-way headway feedback control methods, both operated with static gains and mathematically and computationally simpler than predictive control, are modified to operate with variable gains according to the bus load using two different techniques. A variable slack, dependent on the bus load, is also incorporated into the controllers. Microsimulations of a BRT corridor with concentrated and distributed demand patterns have shown that the proposed techniques improve the system performance when compared to the corresponding methods with fixed gain.