Probabilistic Modelling of the Impact on Bus Punctuality of a Speed Limit Proposal in Edinburgh (Extended Version)
This work addresses the specific problem of assessing traffic policy impacts on bus services for urban planners and transport authorities, but it is incremental as it extends prior conference work and applies existing modeling frameworks to a new case study.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating how a proposed speed limit in Edinburgh would affect bus punctuality by developing a data-driven methodology using high-frequency Automatic Vehicle Location data to model bus movement along route patches, fitting time distributions to hyper-Erlang and gamma distributions, and using Probabilistic Timed Automata with UPPAAL for evaluation, but no concrete numerical results on punctuality improvements are provided in the abstract.
We propose a data-driven methodology for evaluating the impact of the introduction of a speed limit on the punctuality of bus services. In particular, we use high-frequency Automatic Vehicle Location data to parameterise a model that represents the movement of a bus along predefined patches of the route. We fit the probability distributions of the time spent in each patch to two classes of probability distributions: hyper-Erlang distributions, for which we use the tool HyperStar, and a variation of the three-parameter gamma distributions recommended by the Traffic Engineering Handbook. In both cases we obtain models that can be expressed using the framework of Probabilistic Timed Automata, allowing us to evaluate bus punctuality using the model checking tool UPPAAL. We conduct a case study involving a proposed speed limit in Edinburgh. This is an extended version of a paper presented at ValueTools 2015.