A Model for Holding Strategy in Public Transit Systems with Real-time Information

Holdingstrategies are among the most commonly used operation-control strategies in publictransitsystems. These strategies are most effective when used to control services characterized by high frequency. In this paper, a mathematical model for aholding control strategy is developed. Particularly, this model uses real-timeinformation of locations of buses along a specified route. The objective of the developed model is to minimize the waiting time of passengers at all stops on that route. Furthermore, the model developed in this paper is characterized by the flexibility of adopting situations where bus occupancy could be either high, or low. A heuristic is developed to circumvent the complexity of the solution for the problem described. Numerical examples and computational results are presented and discussed.