Redirecting Passengers and Reallocating Capacities during Incidents in Public Transport

The attractiveness of a system is directly connected to its reliability. The more reliable a system is the more attractive it is for its (potential) users. In public transport this means that more people shift to public means of transport when it gets more reliable. One way to improve their reliability is to mitigate the negative effects of incidents on the public transport service and on its users. This paper introduces a new passenger centric incident management method to mitigate negative effects of incidents. Incidents such as traffic accidents and congestion, ambulance deployment, technical failures and similar events cause service cancellations and delays which disrupt the planned trips of passengers. By redirecting affected passengers onto alternative paths whilst considering capacities to avoid secondary incidents lead to a significant reduction of delays. An additional reduction can be gained by reallocating vacant capacities onto desired alternative paths to support the redirection of passengers logistically. A numerical example is presented, showing the positive effects of the here presented passenger centric method through redirecting passengers and reallocating capacities. These are the first steps towards an optimal solution to passenger centric incident management in public transport.     «

The attractiveness of a system is directly connected to its reliability. The more reliable a system is the more attractive it is for its (potential) users. In public transport this means that more people shift to public means of transport when it gets more reliable. One way to improve their reliability is to mitigate the negative effects of incidents on the public transport service and on its users. This paper introduces a new passenger centric incident management method to mitigate negative ef...     »