Are we there yet? : Prediciting bus arrival times with an artificial neural network

Abstract: Public transport authority UL (Upplands Lokaltrafik) aims to reduce emissions, air pollution, and traffic congestion by providing bus journeys as an alternative to using a car. In order to incentivise bus travel, accurate predictions are critical to potential passengers. Accurate arrival time predictions enable the passengers to spend less time waiting for the bus and revise their plan for connections when their bus runs late. According to literature, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) has the ability to capture nonlinear relationships between time of day and position of the bus and its arrival time at upcoming bus stops. Using arrival times of buses on one line from July 2018 to February 2019, a data-set for supervised learning was curated and used to train an ANN. The ANN was implemented on data from the city buses and compared to one of the models currently in use. Analysis showed that the ANN was better able to handle the fluctuations in travel time during the day, only being outperformed at night. Before the ANN can be implemented, real time data processing must be added. To cement its practicality, whether its robustness can be improved upon should be explored as the current model is highly dependent on static bus routes.