Abstract
The VAMPIRES bus scheduling program has its origins in railway locomotive scheduling work over the period 1960-1965 (Wolfenden and Wren (7)), and was adapted to bus scheduling in 1970 (Wren (8)). Throughout the 1970s continual improvements were made, and the definitive version of the stand-alone program is given by Smith and Wren (4). VAMPIRES is based on a powerful heuristic which seeks out all opportunities of dead running and identifies changes which would have to be made to trip timings if a solution is to be achieved with a particular number of buses.
Early versions of the BUSMAN system have been described at previous workshops. BUSMAN consists of the TASC and VAMPIRES bus scheduling components (BUSPLAN) and the COMPACS and IMPACS crew scheduling or run cutting components (CREWPLAN). Since 1984, BUSPLAN and CREWPLAN have been adapted for IBM-PC compatible micro-computers; the opportunity has been taken to make the system much more user-friendly, and to rationalise the interaction between the complementary sub-systems. This paper first introduces BUSMAN, then describes the philosophy of the Micro-BUSMAN system. Input mechanisms are outlined, and an assessment is made of the relative suitabilities of the TASC and VAMPIRES algorithms. The COMPACS crew scheduling system, which has not been presented in full elsewhere, is outlined, and its integration with IMPACS described. The transfer of the algorithms from mainframes to micros is briefly discussed, and the mode of using the whole Micro-BUSMAN suite is presented. The extent to which the system is currently being used is outlined.
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References
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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Wren, A., Chamberlain, M. (1988). The Development of Micro-BUSMAN: Scheduling on Micro-Computers. In: Daduna, J.R., Wren, A. (eds) Computer-Aided Transit Scheduling. Lecture Note in Economics Mathematical Systems, vol 308. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-85966-3_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-85966-3_14
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