Reducing intercity bus crashes through driver rescheduling

Abstract

Intercity bus crashes often involve driver fatigue, which itself is usually the result of sleep deprivation, long driving hours, a maladjusted circadian rhythm, or some combination of the above. And driver scheduling has long been suspected as the root cause affecting sleepiness and fatigue. As such, a fundamental question for intercity bus carriers is how to reduce crashes associated with driver schedules, while maintaining a nonstop service? This research seeks to develop a paradigm to minimize overall fleet crash risk by rescheduling. In this study, we first identified those driving schedules associated with the highest crash risks, and a rescheduling scheme is then proposed to reduce fleet crashes overall. A case-study approach was employed to identify driver scheduling associated with higher crash risk, and a mathematical program was then formulated to minimize fleet crash risk. Our results showed that several types of driver schedules would lead to higher crash risk; for example: (1) working in the afternoon or early hours in the morning for two consecutive days; and (2) commencing a driving shift in the mornings, the afternoon or the early hours of the morning after being off-duty for more than 24 h. To meet the challenge of maintaining a nonstop service while simultaneously minimizing the crash risk associated with these risk patterns, a mathematical program was developed, and it was found that rescheduling based on our algorithm could reduce the incidence of crashes by approximately 30 percent.