Integrated Planning and Operation of Bus Bridging Evacuation for Metro Rail Disruption

Abstract

Bus bridging evacuation refers to transporting affected passengers to their destination stations during metro disruption by buses dispatched from depots. Planning bus bridging plays an important role in maintaining the level of service of metro rail and serving affected passenger demands. This paper presents an integrated planning and operational model for bus bridging evacuation, in which the varying bridging passenger demand at disrupted metro stations, the arrival and departure of bus fleets, the dwelling time of a bus fleet, and the number of alighting and boarding passengers at disrupted metro stations are captured in detail. Based on the dynamics of a bus bridging system, bus bridging routes are planned to stop at intermediate disrupted metro stations between their dispatched disrupted metro station and turnover stations. Results of a case study with Shanghai metro line 16 demonstrate the advantage of the proposed planning model in real-world application. The proposed model and its simulation-based solving algorithm yield economical bridging plans with fewer dispatched buses and lower operation cost compared with our previous model. Results of the case study show that total operation cost and computation time are contradictory with each other. The combination of larger population size, larger maximum number of generations, and larger crossover rate probably contributes to finding the globally optimal bus dispatch plan.