Design of Network Green Bands Considering Trams

Abstract

The rapid growth of tram use in urban transport has been receiving attention throughout the world, but poor coordination within the traffic system hinders the full achievement of its potential. To deal with the deficiency of study on green bands concerning trams, an arterial green band model is advanced based on MAXBAND model and the multipath progression model. Moreover, a framework of generalized constraints is proposed to extend the arterial model to a network one, which is capable of creating green bands for many paths that go through different parts of a network. The goal of optimization is maximizing the weighted sum of the bandwidth for general vehicles, with trams given green bands wide enough for operation. A statistical appraisal of the model manifests its effectiveness in regard to that problem. Regarding MAXBAND as the benchmark, experimental data suggest that the proposed method offers improvements of 13.50% in average travel time and 12.10% in average halts for outbound general vehicles, while the numbers for inbound general vehicles are 25.10% and 10.00%. Meanwhile, tram operation has also been smoothened, with the travel time being reduced by 3.7% and 1.2% in outbound and inbound directions, respectively.