The bus transit assignment depends on the route choice behaviour of the commuters. As the transit users have to choose among available bus routes, the conventional methods cannot be used efficiently. Hence, fuzzy logic approach was tried to determine the efficacy of the approach by conducting a case study in a small city like Trivandrum in India. The factors affecting the route choice behaviour of bus transit users were identified and prioritised by conducting a questionnaire survey. The factors in the order of priority were journey time, fare, number of transfers, time for transfer, crowding in bus and condition of road. A set of fuzzy rules was formulated and fuzzy preference based approach was used to determine the route utility. Three membership functions were considered for each input variable. The output variable, utility value was assigned five membership functions. From the utility value the proportion of transit users to be assigned on a route was obtained. The proportion of transit users along available routes between two origin destination pairs obtained from the model was compared with the actual proportion of passenger flow along those routes. The root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.064 proved the validity of the model. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E217099.
Abstract