Abstract
This paper deals with an operation concept of "time-transfer of buses", in which buses arrive a transfer center at the same time and allow passengers to transfer to other bus lines, so that passengerscan go anywhere all the timed-transfere buses operate with only one transfer. This timed-transfer bus system is known as an efficient operating technique which can be adopted in an area with sparsely distrubuted bus demand. A model of timed-transfer is estabilished in terms of vaious factors such as the expected(or average) arrival time, distribution of arrival time, timed-transfer cycle, shceduled departure time, etc. It is assumed that the objective of timed-transfer bus system is to minimize the total transfer waiting time. The optimal schedualed arrival time or buffer time(time required to arrive ealy in consideration of delay) is analyzed for a general case and various speicial cases. It was found that the optiaml buffer time is an inverse funcion of the timed-transfer cycl and increases with the cycle time, assumin g that there is a fixed scheduled departure time at the transfer cetner regardless of whether one or more buses fail to arrive before the scheduled departure time. If buses are to wait uhtil all the buses arrive at the transfer center, that is, the transfer departure time is vairable, the optimal scheduled arrival times can be obtained by a mathmatical programming.
