CASPT 2018 Extended Abstract 1 TransitUC, Dictuc, Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Casilla 306, Código 105, Santiago, Chile. Email: pedro.lizana@transituc.com 2 Department of Transport Engineering and Logistics, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Casilla 306, Código 105, Santiago, Chile Email: giesen@puc.uc.cl A Smart Dispatching tool based on AVL data Pedro Lizana 1 · Ricardo Giesen 1,2 · Felipe Delgado 1,2 · Juan Carlos Muñoz 2 · Diego García 1 · Paul Basnak 2 Abstract: Headway regularity is one of the main factors for bus quality of service as well as a performance indicator for Transantiago, the bus system of Santiago de Chile. Given that a significant part of headway variability is due to dispatch problems, we developed an algorithm to minimize penalties to operators for frequency and regularity non-compliance, which was then applied in a tool for bus dispatchers starting in mid-2017. The results have been successful: Keywords: Public transport · Bus dispatch · Headway regularity · Headway optimization 1 Introduction Frequency and regularity are probably the most important elements in order to provide a good transit level of service. Santiago de Chile is launching a new bidding process for its Transantiago bus system; in this context, the greatest demands made by the citizens in 2016 were frequency and regularity (27%) followed by the service quality (20%) and bus design (13%) (DTPM, 2016). One of the problems faced by operators to achieve high levels of regularity is that bus services have a natural tendency to bunch, due to spatial and temporal variations in passenger demand and travel times (Daganzo, 2009). Several control strategies have been proposed to solve this problem; among them, holding has been one of the most widely studied (Eberlein et al., 2001; Sun and Hickman, 2008; Bartholdi and Eisenstein, 2012). This approach, which can be very effective but reduces operational speeds, can also be combined with boarding limits, in which the numberof boarding passengers in a given stop can be limited in order to increase operational speed (Delgado et al., 2012). In 2014, we started to implement a real-time control system in several lines of the Transantiago system, based on Delgado et al. (2012) proposal. Even though the results were encouraging, we found that a significant percentage of the irregularity was due to bad dispatching policies which were not addressed by that tool. Transantiago has currently two compliance standards which apply for specific bus services (Beltrán et al., 2012): ICF, a frequency indicator that measures the percentage of programmed bus-trips effectively provided, and ICR, a standardized regularity indicator based on the coefficient of variation of the headways observed