A Semi-Dynamic Bus Routing Infrastructure based on MBTA Bus Data

Abstract: Transportation is quickly evolving in the emerging smart city ecosystem with personalized ride sharing services quickly advancing. Yet, the public bus infrastructure has been slow to respond to these trends. With our research, we propose a semi-dynamic bus routing framework that is data-driven and responsive to relevant parameters in bus transport. We use newly published bus event data from a bus line in Boston and several algorithmic heuristics to create this framework and demonstrate the capabilities and results. We find that this approach yields a very promising routing infrastructure that is smarter and more dynamic than the existing system.