Abstract
The efficiency of Public Transportation (PT) Networks is a major goal of any urban area authority. Advances on both location and communication devices drastically increased the availability of the data generated by their operations. Adequate Machine Learning methods can thus be applied to identify patterns useful to improve the Schedule Plan. In this paper, the authors propose a fully automated learning framework to determine the best Schedule Coverage to be assigned to a given PT network based on Automatic Vehicle location (AVL) and Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) data. We formulate this problem as a clustering one, where the best number of clusters is selected through an ad-hoc metric. This metric takes into account multiple domain constraints, computed using Sequence Mining and Probabilistic Reasoning. A case study from a large operator in Sweden was selected to validate our methodology. Experimental results suggest necessary changes on the Schedule coverage. Moreover, an impact study was conducted through a large-scale simulation over the affected time period. Its results uncovered potential improvements of the schedule reliability on a large scale.
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Notes
- 1.
Reports stoppage time at stops. Includes a fixed delay due to door opening and closing time, and a variable delay caused by passengers boarding/alighting activities.
- 2.
All the normalizations done throughout this section used the Euclidean distance.
- 3.
Note that this naive timetabling procedure is done only for this specific purpose. Once the coverage is changed, the entire timetable of the affected periods need to be recomputed. The reader can consult the work in [15] to know more about this topic.
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Acknowledgements
This work was also supported by the European Commission under TEAM, a large scale integrated project part of the Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration [Grant Agreement No. 318621]. The authors would like to thank all partners within TEAM for their cooperation and valuable contribution.
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Khiari, J., Moreira-Matias, L., Cerqueira, V., Cats, O. (2016). Automated Setting of Bus Schedule Coverage Using Unsupervised Machine Learning. In: Bailey, J., Khan, L., Washio, T., Dobbie, G., Huang, J., Wang, R. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. PAKDD 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9651. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31753-3_44
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