Performance Evaluation of a RFID-Enabled Real Time Bus Dispatching System: Case study of the Bangkok bus system

This paper aims to present and evaluate the performance of one of the first real-time bus dispatching system in Bangkok, Thailand. The proposed bus dispatching system receives the real-time bus location data from the RFID sensor network. The paper provides the background and brief description of both the hardware and architecture of the RFID sensor network and the real-time bus dispatching system. The bus dispatching system continuously monitors the status of each bus and updates its expected arrival time at the depot using the real-time data from the RFID sensor network. If the expected number of vehicles falls below the required level, then the bus dispatching system will adjust the service headway and vehicle/driver assignments to minimize the impact on the service headway. The system is implemented on one of a bus lines in Bangkok. The main focus of the paper is to evaluate the performance of the implemented system by comparing the bus service qualities before and after the implementation of the real-time bus dispatching system. One month bus service data both before and after the system deployment are used in the evaluation of the bus level of service. The result illustrates the potential real-life benefit of the real-time bus dispatching system despite the simplicity of the timetable adjustment strategy.