Development of a Spreadsheet Solver for Regional Bus Timetabling

One of the vital processes in bus operation is timetable development. Timetable generation influences the whole operational structure of a bus network. Custom tailoring of commercially available software packages remains a challenge for small and medium bus organisations/companies operating in cities in India. This study aims at developing a tool for bus timetabling in a city that can be run on a widely available spreadsheet software. The objective is to produce timetables with maximum synchronizations to facilitate passenger transfers and avoid bus bunching along the network. The scheduling tool enables the users to input passenger data and analyse characteristics of each route in the network to study the operations of the bus service. The proposed solution algorithm coded as a Multi-start iterated local search algorithm was tested on different real-life examples. The total number of synchronizations was found to depend on the headway and the specified time limits mainly. From the test results, it can be inferred that the solver can be used to obtain efficient timetables with maximum synchronizations between routes.