Abstract:Metro disruptions due to unexpected events reduce the reliability of transit systems and result in significant productivity loss and long travel delaysfor passengers. Bus bridging strategy is often used to evacuate stranded passengers during metro disruptions. Most existing studies on bus bridging focus on designating buses to pre-designed routes, which restricts the flexibility of bridgingplan and decreases the operational efficiency.This paper develops a plan-based flexible bus bridging strategy, under which a bus will serve an ordered list of disrupted stations instead of a fixed route. Two bus bridging models are formulated to optimize the bridging plans with the objective to minimizethe bus bridgingtime and the total passenger delay, respectively. The proposed models are validated and evaluated through a case study. Results demonstrate that the proposed models are capable of minimizing the bus bridgingtime and the total passenger delay, as well as balancing bridgingtime over all disrupted stations.