Travel time prediction of urban public transportation based on detection of single routes

PLoS One. 2022 Jan 14;17(1):e0262535. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262535. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Improving travel time prediction for public transit effectively enhances service reliability, optimizes travel structure, and alleviates traffic problems. Its greater time-variance and uncertainty make predictions for short travel times (≤35min) more subject to be influenced by random factors. It requires higher precision and is more complicated than long-term predictions. Effectively extracting and mining real-time, accurate, reliable, and low-cost multi-source data such as GPS, AFC, and IC can provide data support for travel time prediction. Kalman filter model has high accuracy in one-step prediction and can be used to calculate a large amount of data. This paper adopts the Kalman filter as a travel time prediction model for a single bus based on single-line detection: including the travel time prediction model of route (RTM) and the stop dwell time prediction model (DTM); the evaluation criteria and indexes of the models are given. The error analysis of the prediction results is carried out based on AVL data by case study. Results show that under the precondition of multi-source data, the public transportation prediction model can meet the accuracy requirement for travel time prediction and the prediction effect of the whole route is superior to that of the route segment between stops.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Forecasting / methods*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Motor Vehicles
  • Public Sector / trends
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Time Factors*
  • Transportation / methods*
  • Travel / economics
  • Travel / statistics & numerical data

Grants and funding

This research was supported by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (General program) ( Grant NO. LY18G010009), Zhejiang Provincial Educational Committee(Grant NO.Y201738488), the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Scholars, Ministry of Education of China(Grant NO.ZC304012027).The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.