Computational procedures for steady-state characteristics of unscheduled multi-carrier shuttle systems

Abstract

The transportation system considered in this paper has a number of vehicles with no capacity constraint, which take passengers from a source terminal to various destinations and return to the terminal. The trip times are considered to be independent and identically distributed random variables with a common exponential distribution. Passengers arrive at the terminal in accordance with a Poisson process. The system is operated under the following policy: when a vehicle is available and there are at least α passengers waiting for service, then a vehicle is dispatched immediately. The passenger queue length and waiting time distributions are obtained under steady-state conditions. System performance measures such as average passenger queue length and waiting time are then derived. A minimum average cost criterion is then used to determine the optimal fleet size and dispatching policy. This is a generalization of the results of Weiss for a single-vehicle system.