Optimized Passenger Redirection During Incidents in Urban Public Transportation Systems

Incidents disrupt the public transportation (PT) operation daily causing parts of the PT system to be temporarily out of service. The dispatchers in the operations control center (OCC) take multiple dispositive measures to resolve the incident and to mitigate its negative effects on the PT services. Usually, such measures are supply-centric readjustments of PT lines. Recent studies have shown that passenger-centric extensions can further mitigate the negative effects of incidents. This paper presents a passenger-centric incident management method, in which the passengers directly affected by an incident are given a redirection path advice to systematically reduce their total delay. This advice is consistent for all passengers associated with the same origin-destination relation. It is assumed that dispatchers in OCCs often have quite a good intuition on the duration of incidents and have access to demand estimations. Based on these assumptions this study compares a heuristic and an optimization-based approach. First, the procedure simulates scenarios with and without an incident to set the lower and higher benchmark for the overall delay, respectively. In the latter case solely supply-centric measures (line-splitting, rerouting PT lines) are taken into account. Then SUMO simulations evaluate the benefits of the additional path advice from the heuristic and optimization-based passenger-centric procedures. The results show that both approaches can significantly lower overall passenger delay with optimization providing the best results.     «

Incidents disrupt the public transportation (PT) operation daily causing parts of the PT system to be temporarily out of service. The dispatchers in the operations control center (OCC) take multiple dispositive measures to resolve the incident and to mitigate its negative effects on the PT services. Usually, such measures are supply-centric readjustments of PT lines. Recent studies have shown that passenger-centric extensions can further mitigate the negative effects of incidents. This paper pre...     »