Modeling and Quantifying Interaction of Information and Capacity in Public Transport Disruptions

Mahsa Rahimi Siegrist,Francesco Corman

doi:10.1155/2021/5398316

Abstract

Disruption in public transport networks has adverse implications for both passengers and service managers. To evaluate the effects of disruptions on passengers’ behaviour, various methods, simulation modules, and mathematical models are widely used. However, such methods included many assumptions for the sake of simplicity. We here use multiagent microsimulation modules to simulate complex real-life scenarios. Aspects that were never explicitly modelled together are the capacity of the network and the effect of disruption to on-board passengers, who might need to alight the disrupted services. In addition, our simulation and developed module provide a framework that can be applied for both transport planning and real-time management of disruption for the large-scale network. We formalize the agent-based assignment problem in capacitated transit networks for disrupted situations, where some information is available about the disruption. We extend a microsimulation environment to quantify precisely the impact and the number of agents directly and indirectly affected by the disruption, respectively, those passengers who cannot perform their trip because of disrupted services (directly affected passengers), and those passengers whose services are not disrupted but experience additional crowding effects (indirectly affected passengers). The outcomes are discussed both from passengers’ perspective and for extracting more general planning and policy recommendations. The modeling and solution approaches are applied to the multimodal public transport system of Zürich, Switzerland. Our results show that different information dissemination strategies have a large impact on direct and indirect effects. By earlier information dissemination, the direct effects get milder but larger in space, and indirect negative effects arise. The scenarios with the least information instead are very strongly affecting few passengers, while the less negative indirect effect for the rest of the network.

Highlights

Disruptions cause complex logistical rescheduling problems when they limit the availability of transport networks
Delay Analysis for Directly Affected Agents. is section quantifies the effects of the different information strategies on the arrival time of the directly affected agents to evaluate the effects of information strategies in mitigating the delay
To avoid adding more complexity, we assume that activities cannot be dropped; the utility is directly related to just the stages to be chosen and their travel time and delay

Summary

Introduction

Disruptions cause complex logistical rescheduling problems when they limit the availability of transport networks. Disruptions have different impacts as the network provides mobility only at specified times (when a vehicle runs) and spaces (at stops), limiting available choices for replanning. Users have only a limited information of what is happening in the network, as those latter are complex with hundreds of stops and vehicles. Collecting data from passengers facing a disruption is even more complex (what do passenger choose, based on which information, and what outcome they experience); as Journal of Advanced Transportation stated preference is subject to strong bias, revealed preference has too limited a view on the effectively available alternatives, and prompt recall studies are subject to filtering bias from participants; concluding, this approach is effectively insufficient to properly estimate impacts [1]

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Conclusion