Destination Estimation for Bus Passengers Based on Data Fusion

Abstract EN

The planning and operation of urban buses depend heavily on the time-varying origin-destination (OD) matrix for bus passengers.

In most cities, however, only boarding information is recorded, while the alighting information is not available.

This paper proposes a novel method to predict the destination of a single bus passenger based on bus smartcard data, metro smartcard data, and global positioning system (GPS) bus data.

First, the attractiveness of each bus stop in a bus line was evaluated, considering the attractiveness of nearby metro stations.

Then, the exploration and preferential return (EPR) model was employed to estimate the probability of a bus stop to be the alighting stop, i.e., the destination, of a passenger.

The estimation result was obtained through a simulation based on the Monte Carlo (MC) algorithm.

The effectiveness of our method was proved through a case study on the bus network in Shenzhen, China.