Long-term Prediction of Bus Travel Time Using Bus Information System Data

Recently, various public transportation activation policies are being implemented in order to mitigate traffic congestion in metropolitan areas. Especially in the metropolitan area, the bus information system has been introduced to provide information on the current location of the bus and the estimated arrival time. However, it is difficult to predict the travel time due to repetitive traffic congestion in buses passing through complex urban areas due to repetitive traffic congestion and bus bunching. The previous bus travel time study has difficulties in providing information on route travel time of bus users and information on long-term travel time due to short-term travel time prediction based on the data-driven method. In this study, the path based long-term bus travel time prediction methodology is studied. For this purpose, the training data is composed of 2015 bus travel information and the 2016 data are composed of verification data. We analyze bus travel information and factors affecting bus travel time were classified into departure time, day of week, and weather factors. These factors were used into clusters with similar patterns using self organizing map. Based on the derived clusters, the reference table for bus travel time by day and departure time for sunny and rainy days were constructed. The accuracy of bus travel time derived from this study was verified using the verification data. It is expected that the prediction algorithm of this paper could overcome the limitation of the existing intuitive and empirical approach, and it is possible to improve bus user satisfaction and to establish flexible public transportation policy by improving prediction accuracy.