Study and Implementation of a Decision Support System

A decision support system (DSS) is developed for urban mass transit service planning, which is designed for several types of users, such as transit operators for service planning, a public agency for regulation of transit services, or transit passengers for route guidance. The DSS provides a flexible mechanism to deal with data. It may include various transit networks and one transit network has one corresponding database. An efficient algorithm for finding reasonable paths in a transit network is presented, which is used in the DSS for passenger’s trip planning. The algorithm can be useful in various transit networks. A trip prediction model based on fuzzy neural network is employed in the system to forecast the number of trips entering or leaving a station. Several realistic transit networks in Hong Kong and Guangzhou are selected as case studies in different phases of the system development. To evaluate the performance of the system, some practitioners in transport planning and potential users were invited to participate in testing the system. The results of the prototype evaluation were satisfactory and the viability of the DSS as a useful tool for supporting decision has been ascertained by the positive feedback obtained from the survey questionnaires.