THE REAL-TIME DEADHEADING PROBLEM IN TRANSIT OPERATIONS CONTROL

In high frequency transit operations, randomness and incidents often r esult in highly irregular headways which can significantly decrease se rvice quality. Deadheading is one commonly used real-time operations c ontrol strategy that can improve service quality in such situations. W hen a vehicle is deadheaded, it runs empty from a terminal skipping a number of stations, typically in order to reduce expected large headwa ys at later stations. The real-time deadheading problem is to determin e at dispatching time which vehicles to deadhead and how many stations to skip in order to minimize the total passenger cost in the system. This paper formulates this problem, optimally solves a simplified vers ion of the general formulation, and demonstrates that the solutions of the simpler problem are good approximations to the solutions of the m ore general problem. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserve d.