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 The final computations in schedule design will produce a summary of the activity that will occur on the route during the period in question. We’ll continue our example problem, which was introduced in the 'preliminary schedule design' section, to illustrate the steps and the desired result. Our preliminary schedule design conclusions were that we needed 6 vehicles running with 10-minute headways to service the demand of 400 passengers/hour between ‘A’ and ‘B’. Let’s assume that these calculations were meant for the morning peak-period of 7:00 a.m. through 9:00 a.m. First, we list the departure times from ‘A’ for each vehicle during the peak-period.
Next, since we know that it takes 25 minutes for each vehicle to proceed from ‘A’ to ‘B’, we can record the arrival times. Including 5-minutes of layover time at each terminal ‘A’ and ‘B’, we can include the departure times as well. Notice that the work so far has been vehicle-independent. We are only recording the times at which these events should occur, not which vehicle should be at each station at these times.
Now that we have a schedule of times, we can try to link together these times into routes that specific vehicles can follow. For example, if a vehicle were to leave ‘A’ at 7:00, it would arrive at ‘A’ again at 7:55. This vehicle could then start again with the 8:00 shift. Extending this process leads to the table below.
At this point, we can prepare the final vehicle block summary. This summary simply indicates the times that each vehicle will be in service and the vehicle block that the vehicle will be assigned to.
The tables that have been developed in this section are the ultimate result of schedule design.
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