A Real-Time Control Strategy for Bus Operation to Alleviate Bus Bunching

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper proposes a real-time dynamic control strategy that considers three aspects of bus cruising time, dwell time and bus load rate at the same time. 

The results are new and interesting. But the presentation as well as the grammar is so poor.

The authors should also consider the punctutations like No.245 and the last of equations.

The authors should clearly state the parameters they use in their control models and compare them to conventional methods by tables. Figures are not also clear, they should be given more detailed. 

The references should written with a unify style. In particular, the authors' names and titles should be written with a unify style.

If the above mentioned corrections are fulfilled, it may be reconsidered for publication.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

General speaking, the paper is well written. 

 

The author has proposed a novel strategy and compared their methods with the traditional one in simulation. Based on the simulation results, they show the superiors of their three strategies.

 

There are some shortcoming. 

1. The conclusion is too long. It is more like a discussion. Please modify it. I never think a decent paper has so long conclusion. 

2. The figures are blur. Please use vector image, such as EPS, pdf, svg format rather than png or jpg. 

3. the auhtor has cited a lot of papers about the bus in China, which makes the generalization of the results questionable. Please add some ideas or research from outside of China.

4. The paper is about using simulation to validate the control strategy of buses. However, they do not use the state-of-the-art research based on CARLA or LGSVL. I think the authors should at least mention these reaserches in their paper. The first one is about the  Simulator, the second is about the bus simulation. 

 

1) A. Dosovitskiy, G. Ros, F. Codevilla, A. Lopez, and V. Koltun, “Carla: An open urban driving simulator,” 2017.

2) Y. Xiang, S. Wang, T. Su, J. Li, S. S. Mao and M. Geimer, "KIT Bus: A Shuttle Model for CARLA Simulator," 2021 IEEE Industrial Electronics and Applications Conference (IEACon), 2021, pp. 7-12, doi: 10.1109/IEACon51066.2021.9654633.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is well structured, although the comparison with non controlled case could be more clear. It could have a summarised comparison between controlled and non controlled cases, to see the gain in a real clear way. Other way I like this paper, the topic is really nice.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper presents a simulation experiment of bus operation where three control strategies were simulated and evaluated. The manuscript will still need further improvement to fulfill the academic publication requirement so that the contribution can be claimed elaborately. Some suggestions for improvement, but not limited to, are as follows.

1. The objective of the study must be clearly stated, probably somewhere at the end of Section 1, before the paper structure.

2. The headway evaluation in (6) needs reference to other studies where other kinds of evaluation measures may have been employed. 

3. BIMS (line 243) needs further description.

4. The case study descriptions (line 287s) will need elaboration. More description of the city and the bus line will be useful, e.g., urban area characteristics, bus travel demand, road traffic situation, present operation statistics, etc.

5. More description on the data survey will also be needed, e.g, when and how the survey was conducted in more detail. Reference on the method will also be useful.

6. Some important information on the simulation is missing. What is the simulation platform? What was the software or programming language employed? How was the simulation conducted? What was the computation effort? Running time and performance? How randomness of the mixed-traffic speed and dwell time was represented?

7. Section 5 is mainly a summary of the paper. Discussion on the result and real implementation are still needed. Definitely, S3, so-called the real-time control strategy, must be superior over the two because there will be other factors of uncertainty not being simulated. For example, the bus driver might not be able to accelerate to catch up with the desired or optimal speed being suggested when the road is congested. Since this is the main part of the paper, proper literature review on the real-time mixed-traffic bus operation control strategy, simulation, and implementation needs to be worked out (in addition to the existing short summary of the references [4] to [7] in the introduction. Doing so will make the discussion of the results strong and valid. 

8. Recommendation for the future study will be useful.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

There are still some typos and punctuations.

Please see the attached file.

Also, I suggest a deeply checking for all errors.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has been improved a lot. Thank you. 

Author Response

Sustainability

Manuscript number: 1759160

 

                                                                        Yunqiang Xue

                                                                        Associate Professor

                                                                        East China Jiaotong University

                                                                        Nanchang 330013, China

                                                                        Jun.22^ed.2022

 

Dear reviewers,

 

I am writing to you regarding the second modifications made to our paper (manuscript number 1759160: “A Real-time Control Strategy for Bus Operation to Alleviate Bus Bunching”) in light of the reviewers’ comments.

All of the comments from the four anonymous reviewers were carefully studied and followed when revising the paper. The details about our response to the reviewers’ comments are summarized in the attachment at the end of this letter for your convenience.

We truly appreciate the reviewers’ constructive comments and believe that the revised paper is now clearer and more useful to researchers and practitioners. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]

 

 

Sincerely yours,

Yunqiang Xue

Reviewer 4 Report

The conclusion section could be more interesting, if more emphasis is given to the contribution of the work with respect to the previous research, especially in the bus operation research.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf