1-4: Transit Priority

To establish an efficient way of improving the service quality of the public transportation system, this research seeks the optimal vehicle scheduling at a multi-conflict area considering heterogeneous vehicle headways and weighted by vehicle occupancies to minimize the total travel time delay cost while giving priority to transits with higher occupancy. A mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is proposed to solve the exact optimal solution to this problem and a customized branch-and-bound algorithm is designed to improve computational efficiency. A set of numerical experiments in various scenarios are tested to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. The comparison results show that coordination of vehicles with individual-vehicle-based control can significantly increase the capacity of the conflict area and reduce the delay of transits compared to existing well-known control strategies (e.g., stop signs and signals).