Short-Term prediction of vehicle occupancy in Advanced Public Transportation Information Systems (APTIS)

Most ITS applications to transit systems are oriented to the efficient management of Public Transportation (PT) operator’s resources, that is crew and fleet of vehicles. However, the potential of ITS application to transit system goes further than the efficient management of the fleet of vehicles. In fact, information on the real-time actual network state, if communicated to travelers, may be an effective tool for improving quality and effectiveness of services and, hence, for diverting people to PT modes. In this paper, we focus on Advanced Public Transportation Information System (APTIS) deploying shared en-route descriptive information. The case study of the city of Naples (Italy) is analyzed. Here PT travelers have reacted positively to being provided information on waiting time at stops and have expressed great interest in receiving additional information such as passenger occupancy of future vehicles. The latter information can be efficiently obtained by means of a modeling framework simulating travelers path choice and the way in which they propagate over the network, as well as Origin-Destination (OD) travel demand pattern. Such a modeling framework is described in this paper. This is based on the schedule based approach and simulates within-day dynamics in transit networks, on both the demand and supply side. Preliminary applications to a small-scale example network are also presented in the paper.