Operational Strategy of Demand Buses, Using Self-Organizing Map

Abstract

The demand bus provides interesting moving means as one of new transportation systems, and the research issues about operational strategies of this demand bus system have focused on the trade-off problem between convenience and profit. However, the traditional researches have analyzed the local features of demand bus systems because the strictly limited parameters are used to make its analysis means clear, but could not make the operational strategy of transportation systems explicit from a global point of view. In this paper, we propose a framework to deal with various parameters with a view to estimating the relationship between operational method and service area. Our framework consists of analysis phase and visualization phase. In the analysis phase, we construct common database from many experimental data, generated analytically from the computations among several parameters. In the visualization phase, we visualize the features about operational method and service area, based on the relationships among parameters. In our framework it is possible to evaluate the adaptability of bus systems with respect to operational method and service area globally.