Investigating Reliability and Stability Parameters of City Buses for Intra-city Transportation based on GPS

Today, the use of the GPS global positioning system for intra- and extra-urban transportation is a necessary and undeniable matter. Assessing the reliability and stability of intra-city bus routes has been raised as an important issue that has a great impact on the quality of bus services. In this research, the GPS global positioning system data, which is related to the Yazd City bus system, was used to evaluate the reliability and stability of city buses for intra-city transfers. One of the goals investigated in this research is to examine the parameters affecting bus bunching and analyze the stability of the system as well as the reliability of the public transportation system. In this research, section travel time, dwell time, headway, and bus bunching have been analyzed in terms of time and place. In fact, it is checked how the situation of batch movement occurrence and stability is at different times of the day. In this research, the prediction methods of Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting Regression were used to predict the reliability and stability assessment of bus travel routes. The Gradient Boosting Regression Model had a lower error and better performance for predicting the reliability of the bus travel route and headway than the rest of the prediction models. The results of this research help urban planners understand the stability of stations, identify key points that affect the stability of stations, identify key stations, and provide better transportation services in the future to reduce the waiting time of passengers.