Passenger Boarding/Alighting Management in Urban Rail Transportation

Heavy traffic consequences in crowded cities can be extremely reduced by using mass transportation. Recent extensive studies on Tehran subway system, as a representative of crowded cities, show that ever increasing commutation demand results in rapid decline in service quality and satisfaction level, system capacity wastage, and poorer system performance. Since passenger boarding/alighting period is noticeable compared to the inter-station travel time, it seems that passenger boarding/alighting management would play a significant role in system performance improvement. Aiming at increasing satisfaction level and service success rate, while reducing travel time, different boarding/alighting strategies are proposed. Passengers behaviors are carefully simulated based on a microscopic model, through introducing an inclination function which governs a passengers movement in a two-dimensional queue. Simulation results, in terms of three aforementioned measures of performance, show that in less crowded stations, the first strategy, expectedly, outperforms the other two. However, in crowded stations (e.g. interchange stations) the third strategy outperforms the others significantly.