A holding control strategy for diverging bus lines

Holding has been extensively used as control strategy to regulate public transport operations, especially maintain even headways and prevent buses of the same line bunch up. Applying holding multiple lines requires however deal with transition between corridor branching segments. In this study, we introduce a criterion for network configurations that operate jointly along common then diverge individual branches serving different urban areas. The proposed decision rule accounts all passenger groups in overlapping segment considers operation. is evaluated using simulation demand levels compositions compared state-of-the-art schemes real-world network. Results show multi-line yields performance improvements shared transit well at level. scheme affected by composition provide indications regarding conditions under which advisable.