Impact of possible random factors on queue behaviors of passengers and taxis at taxi stand of transport hubs

Abstract

The waiting processes of both passengers and taxis at taxi stand of transport hubs are a complicated random queueing problem because of some typical random characteristics, including the random number of passengers carried by per taxi, random arrival behaviors of passengers, and taxis, random length of boarding time for a batch of passengers, etc. In particular, the arriving process of passengers at transport hubs often has multiple uncertain peak hours within a day, which makes the waiting times of both the passengers and the taxis highly variable and unpredictable at a certain time. Hence, it is necessary to explore and understand the dynamic queues of the passengers and taxis through fully studying the random nature of this system. In this paper, a matching model with two random inputs is developed to simulate the dynamic queueing behaviors of passengers and taxis by considering the random features of the matching number of passengers, matching time, and time-dependent arrival processes, etc. We obtain some important quantities of queues along the time. A series of numerical simulations is conducted to find how the queues of passengers and taxis are affected by the most possible factors. The proposed model in this paper can provide a methodological possibility of clarifying the dynamic queues of passengers and taxis for not only the computer simulation but also the statistical inference, and will further help to improve the service of the passenger–taxi system.