An Accelerated-Time Simulation of Queues at Ticket Offices at Railway Stations

Abstract

Although nowadays many railway tickets are bought online, still many are bought through rail appointed travel agents and ticket offices at stations. There are several works on microscopic and accelerated-time simulations, some of them related to the topic of this paper, treating passengers movements in railway stations (both of general purpose and also with a focus on specific topics like evacuation, stations design, ticketing, etc.). We focus on a very specific topic: modelling queuing at ticket offices at a main Spanish station where “AVE” (“High-Speed”), “Larga Distancia” (“Long-Distance”), “Media Distancia” (“Middle-Distance”), and “Cercanías” (“Suburban Services”) dedicated windows exist. The existence of “Last Minute” desks is also considered. The goal is to provide the user with a tool that allows to choose the best option for windows distribution along time, after different microscopic simulations based on given data and windows possible distribution are performed (as done in a previous work of one of the authors for airport terminals check-in counters). Special attention is paid to “Last Minute” windows and shared windows (for example simultaneously selling tickets for “Larga Distancia” and “Media Distancia”). Input is given by arrival curves or can be generated by the package. The output is the detailed situation of any window at any moment and the evolution of queues by train or window type. There are different further possible extensions of this work. The implementation has been developed in a computer algebra system in order to minimize the development time.