Highlights A method of organizing rail passengers whose tickets do not have seat information. A real-time seat-allocation heuristic to minimize load discrepancy among carriages. The system improves the boarding/alighting time at each station and across a route. Potential increase in customer satisfaction by considering big luggages and cliques. A discrete event simulation environment to facilitate prototyping and testing.
Abstract Rail is considered as one of the most important ways of transferring passengers. High passenger loads has implications on train punctuality. One of the important parameters affecting punctuality is the average boarding/alighting time. Organizing boarding/alighting flows not only reduces the risk of extended dwell time, but also minimizes the risk of injuries and improves the overall service quality. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of minimizing the boarding/alighting time by maintaining a uniform load on carriages through systematic distribution of passengers with flexible tickets, such as season or anytime tickets where no seat information are provided at the time of reservation. To achieve this, the proposed algorithm takes other information such as passenger final destination, uniform load of luggage areas, as well as group travelers into account. Moreover, a discrete event simulation is designed for measuring the performance of the proposed method. The performance of the proposed method is compared with three algorithms on different test scenarios. The results show the superiority of the proposed method in terms of minimizing boarding/alighting time as well as increasing the success rate of assigning group of seats to group of passengers.
Real-time seat allocation for minimizing boarding/alighting time and improving quality of service and safety for passengers
Tramsportation Research, Part C: Emerging Technologies ; 103 ; 158-173
2019-03-14
16 pages
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Europäisches Patentamt | 2021
|Europäisches Patentamt | 2022
|Effect of vertical step height on boarding and alighting time of train passengers
Online Contents | 2016
|Train design features affecting boarding and alighting of passengers
Online Contents | 2017
|