Transit Signal Priority (TSP) has been commonly employed at intersections along tramlines to reduce tram stops beyond stations. In addition to TSP, tram timetable optimization is another way to reduce the potential stop of trams at intersections. In the literatures, most of tram timetable optimization is firstly to maximize the bandwidths for vehicles given fixed tram bandwidth and then to determine the tram timetable based on the tram green band. These methods may impose limitations on social vehicles and thus vehicular bandwidths cannot achieve the optimal. Moreover, the tram bandwidths are only used as the input of the second step of tram scheduling which result in waste of solution space. To address this problem, an integrated optimization model on tram schedule and arterial signal timing is proposed to increase the efficiency of the whole system including trams and social vehicles. The objective is to minimize the expectation of tram travel time and maximize vehicular bandwidths. In order to improve the robustness of tram timetable, the proposed model takes into account the possible fluctuation of station dwell time. Case studies show that the proposed model is able to provide larger capacity for social vehicles and increase the operational efficiency of the whole system compared with the literature methods. In addition, extensive case studies show that the proposed model can absorb disturbances of dwell time. And the possibility for trams stopping at intersections declines dramatically compared with the model which do not consider the disturbances of dwell time.

CICTP