Bus Operations Toolkit (BOT)

Introduction to the project:

For every city public transportation plays an important role in its growth. It important to have the reliable public transport service and cater the service demand of the city. A city can have widespread route network, and PT agency with large bus fleet size operates through its different depots. Due to this depot-based scheduling of the buses, final timetable of the buses can have a different problem like overlapping of trips, inconsistent headway, and underutilization of the buses.

In our project, we have identified this issue in the current timetable of Bangalore Metropolitan transport corporation (BMTC), which is one of the India’s largest public transport service providers. BMTC has 6565 buses operating on 2203 different routes across the city. The daily number of trips done are 47353.

Our objective for the project is:

To remover the overlapping trips from the timetable i.e., overlaps are defined as multiple trips by different buses from same origin to destination following the same route.
To ensure the proper breaks after each trip
To increase the bus utilization and improve the service reliability.

Representation of overlapping trips

After analyzing the dataset provided by BMTC we found out that given schedule has total 4143 overlapping trips, and almost 50% of the buses are involved in the overlaps. We have represented the hourly band wise overlaps as below:

To address this issue a toolkit is developed with the following approach:

A desktop-based toolkit using the python code is developed, which follows the operation research techniques for the optimization and effective utilization of the bus fleet. GUI of the toolkit looks like follows:

As we can see in the above GUI, a toolkit needs only four inputs, 1. Current schedule of the buses in excel file format 2. Minimum safety headway allowed in minutes which is used for the rescheduling of overlapping trips 3. Maximum running hours of bus in day and 4. Maximum travel time to go from one bus stop to another across the city

Impacts and benefits:

Following are the direct impacts:

Overlapping trips in case of BMTC were reduced to 0 from 4143
2309 redundant trips were removed from timetable
Effective redeployment of 1249 buses were done
Based on the effective redeployment 82 additional buses were available
Additional revenue of ~25.83 crores can be generated annually
~48,000 daily i.e., 1.75 crore additional passenger trips can be added in the timetable

Welfare benefits: