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In public bus transportation systems, several types of disturbances, such as accidents and congestion, may affect preestablished timetables and visiting hours at stations. Disturbances result in detrimental consequences, degraded performance, and poor quality of service in terms of extended delays and waiting times, punctuality, frequency, and efficiency of shuttles. Despite numerous research on the monitoring and control of public transportation systems by means of buses, distributed monitoring and control architectures that confer intelligence and decision‐making autonomy to buses to react to disturbances are still missing. This article addresses this gap by designing and developing a distributed architecture to monitor and control public transportation buses using multiagent systems. The design relies on biological immunity as a methodological framework that guides the development of knowledge models and decision‐making mechanisms. Knowledge models structure knowledge about disturbances and control decisions, whereas decision‐making mechanisms implement control and reaction strategies. Through experimental validation based on simulation, we show that the suggested immune multiagent distributed control architecture is not only able to maintain performance (average delay/earliness, average total time in simulated network) at acceptable levels but also to improve quality of service in terms of number of served passengers and stations by at least 15% in case of disturbances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In public transportation, the occurrence of unpredictable disturbances (e.g. accidents, delays, traffic congestion, etc.) may affect the expected execution of preset organization and pre-established timetables of transportation resources (buses, trains, metros, trams, etc.). Affected timetables may become useless, or at least deviate from expected behavior and/or performance. Unfortunately, existing literature suffers limitations with respect to the development of decision support approaches and tools that are able to help decision makers in monitoring and controlling public transportation systems, particularly at the occurrence of disturbances. Existing works are still limited with respect to dealing with several types of disturbances, and suggesting reactive decisions at execution time in such a way to maintain the performance of pre-established timetables and provide users with high quality of services (in terms of punctuality, frequency of programmed shuttles, etc.). In this paper, we show that biological immunity can provide useful principles and mechanisms that are pertinent for the management of disturbances in public transportation systems. We highlight these principles and mechanisms, associate them with application components and fully document them. To show their feasibility, we develop a prototype artificial immune system able to assist decision makers in performing several disturbance management functions, such as detection of disturbances, construction of reaction strategies, supervised learning and memory of previous experiences with disturbances. Through experimental validation, we show that immune concepts and mechanisms can yield to the design and implementation of knowledge based decision support tools that are able to deal with different kinds of disturbances, and to assist decision makers through the disturbance management process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]