A Quality Control Framework for Bus Schedule Reliability

Authors

Jie Lin
Peng Wang
Darold T. Barnum

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2008

Subject Area

operations - reliability, infrastructure - vehicle, planning - route design, ridership - commuting, mode - bus

Keywords

Vehicle locating systems, Schedules, Reliability (Statistics), Quality control, Product inspection, Motor coaches, Data envelopment analysis, Data collection, Data acquisition, Chicago Transit Authority, Buses, Bus routes, AVL, Automatic vehicle location, Automatic location systems

Abstract

This paper develops and demonstrates a quality control framework for bus schedule reliability. Automatic vehicle location (AVL) devices provide necessary data; data envelopment analysis (DEA) yields a valid summary measure from partial reliability indicators; and panel data analysis provides statistical confidence boundaries for each route-direction's DEA scores. If a route-direction's most recent DEA score is below its lower boundary, it is identified as in need of immediate attention. The framework is applied to 29 weeks of AVL data from 24 Chicago Transit Authority bus routes (and therefore 48 route-directions), thereby demonstrating that it can provide quick and accurate quality control.

Comments

Transportation Research Part E Home Page: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13665545

Recommended Citation

Lin, Jie, Wang, Peng, Barnum, Darold, (2008). A Quality Control Framework for Bus Schedule Reliability. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Volume 44, Issue 6, pp 1086-1098.