On Safety of Passengers Entering a Bus Rapid Transit System from Scheduled Stops

In this paper, we formulate the single-depot vehicle scheduling problem towards maximizing passengers' safety. We focus on passengers waiting at street stops to enter terminal stations of bus rapid transit systems. To maximize safety, we essentially minimize the deviation of the departing schedule from the proposed timetable, so the first waiting time of the passengers is minimized. We formulate an optimization problem that considers the position with respect to the timetable, the speed deviation from a desired interval, and the number of passengers at each stop. Such a problem is solved as an additive cost problem via dynamic programming. We validate the performance of our formulation through numerical simulations. The results show how the optimal policy contributes to passengers' safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to maximize passengers' safety by minimizing their waiting time, and the first approach towards departure time matching using position tracking.