Design of Bus Bridging Routes in Response to Disruption of Urban Rail Transit

Bus bridging has been widely used to connect stations affected by urban rail transit disruptions. This paper designs bus bridging routes for passengers in case of urban rail transit disruption. The types of urban rail transit disruption between Origin-Destination stations are summarized, and alternative bus bridging routes are listed. First, the feasible route generation method is established. Feasible routes for each pair of the disruption Origin-Destination stations include urban rail transit transfer, direct bus bridging, and indirect bus bridging. Then the feasible route generation model with the station capacity constraint is established. The k-short alternative routes are generated to form the bus bridging routes. Lastly, by considering the bus bridging resource constraints, the final bus bridging routes are obtained by merging and filtering the initial bridging routes. Numerical results of an illustrative network show that the bus bridging routes generated from the proposed model can significantly reduce travel delay of blocked passengers, and it is necessary to maintain the number of passengers in the urban rail transit below the station capacity threshold for ensuring a feasible routing design. One more important finding of this work is that the direct bridging route is preferred for short travel distances, while the indirect bridging route is preferred for longer travel distances. After the bridging bus routes are taken, the passenger’s total travel time is significantly lower than when no measures are taken. However, after the capacity constraint of a station is considered, the passenger’s total travel time will be increased by 3.49% compared with not considering a capacity constraint.