Modeling pedestrian behaviors of boarding and alighting dynamics in urban railway stations

Abstract

Boarding and alighting process is the most complicated behaviour at urban railway stations, and significantly affects the service level and evacuation capacities of stations. This paper quantitatively discusses the individual and group behavioural characteristics of both boarding and alighting passengers. The time headways are extracted from surveillance videos. Based on the data analysis results, an improved cellular automata model is proposed to describe the microscopic dynamics of the boarding and alighting process. In this model, three categories of floor fields are defined to describe passenger behaviour. The number of alighting passengers is included to quantitatively describe the boarding and alighting pattern. The time headway is also used to define the following behaviour with leaders. The model is validated and calibrated from several aspects by real data. The proposed model comprehensively reveals the boarding and alighting dynamics, and it can potentially be used to make crowd management in subway stations.