Passenger Transfer Research Articles

Integrated timetable synchronization optimization with capacity constraint under time-dependent demand for a rail transit network

The synchronization of train timetables is an important part of the operation of a rail transit network. Due to the well-designed synchronization of train timetables, passengers can make a smooth transfer without waiting a long time. Most of the current timetable synchronization researches didn’t consider the non-transfer passengers, time-dependent demand and train capacity simultaneously. In order to extend the literature, this paper proposes a mixed-integer programming model under time-dependent demand to minimize passenger total waiting time and the number of passengers who fail to transfer. Train capacity is also considered in the model. Besides, this paper linearizes non-linear constraints to make sure the model can be solved by CPLEX. Genetic algorithm (GA) and grey wolf optimizer (GWO) are designed to solve the large-sized instance. In order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method and algorithm, the numerical test is solved by CPLEX, GA and GWO and the optimization results are compared. Finally, a real-world case study based on the Shenyang rail transit network is applied to validate the proposed model. Optimization results show that compared with actual timetable, the performance of the proposed model is better. Non-transfer passenger waiting time, transfer passenger waiting time at origin stations, transfer waiting time and the number of passengers who fail to transfer are decreased by 3.7%, 1.9%, 26.3% and 8.6% respectively. Moreover, the performance of the proposed model is better than both non-synchronization and narrow synchronization model.

Do airport staff helpfulness and communication generate behavioral loyalty in transfer passengers? A conditional mediation analysis

The footloose nature of transfer passengers in the turbulent air transport market landscape has necessitated the need to assess service marketing constructs relevant for airport competitiveness. The current cross-sectional study examined (1) the influence of transfer passengers’ perceived airport staff helpfulness and communication (H&C) on their behavioral loyalty, (2) the mediating roles of passenger affective image and satisfaction, and (3) the interaction effects of passenger types (trip purpose & travel frequency) and airport in the direct and indirect airport staff H&C – behavioral loyalty relation. Post-hoc analysis of transfer passengers’ perceived airport staff H&C across airports and passenger types was performed. Data was collected from three international airports in China (N = 829). Findings revealed that perceived airport staff H&C has significant positive associations with the three behavioral loyalty variables, and indicated further that these associations are partly explainable via passengers’ affective image and satisfaction. Also, the perceived airport staff H&C’s direct and indirect relations with behavioral loyalty variables are sensitive to passenger types but not airports. Expectedly, the post-hoc analysis showed that transfer passengers’ perceived airport staff H&C is significantly different across passenger types but not airports. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations and directions for future studies have been discussed.

Identifying competitive position for ten Asian aviation hubs

The Asia-Pacific region has become one of the biggest aviation markets in the world, and increasing numbers of airports in this region are keen to develop into aviation hubs. In order to understand the competitive position of the major Asian airports, this research has selected ten primary airports in the Asia-Pacific, and has identified the markets in which they have an advantage by looking into their connectivity levels in terms of both quantity and quality. Specifically, we have examined indicators that include the Quantity of Viable Connections (QVC), Quality of Viable Connections (QCI), the Hub Connectivity Performance Index (HCPI) and the Hub Efficiency Index (HEI) of the selected airports. The results reveal that China's Beijing Capital Airport (PEK) and Shanghai Pudong Airport (PVG) have higher QVC values than the others. They should therefore continue to develop the North America-China routes. Tokyo Narita Airport (NRT) is found to have the largest HEI for markets as a whole, and should continue to develop the North America-Asia Pacific, North America-Southeast Asia and North America-China routes. Taiwan's Taoyuan Airport (TPE) has the highest HEI for the North America-Southeast Asia market, and should therefore increase the frequency of flights in this market in order to attract more transfer passengers. Since Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur Airport (KUL) has the highest HEI and Singapore's Changi Airport (SIN) the highest QVC for the Asia Pacific-Europe market, both airports should continue to concentrate on this market. The analysis presented in this paper could help airport authorities identify their market positions and strengthen their comparative advantages based on the results.

Interdependencies in Seismic Risk Assessment of Seaport Systems: Case Study at Largest Commercial Port in Italy

AbstractSeaports play an essential role in the policies of sustainable mobility as critical links allowing the transfer of goods and passengers, thereby helping to increase the functionality and ef...

The development of transfer passenger volumes and shares at airport and world region levels

Many air travelers have to change planes. Knowledge on transfer passengers and shares at airport to worldwide levels can be useful industry, policy and research questions. However, as such data is usually not disclosed publically, the structure of transfer volumes and shares has not yet been studied in greater detail. This leaves a research (data) gap which this paper intends to close to some extent. More precisely, we aim at assessing: How total transfer passenger volumes have developed, at worldwide and world region levels; how these relate to the volumes of directly flying passengers; the leading transfer airports in absolute and relative sense; and how the latter have changed over time. We present a methodology to calculate transfer passengers from segment passenger split data provided in the “leg flow” statistics module of a global air transport statistical database which consolidates passenger booking data and estimates from various sources. Departing passenger numbers at the airport level are split into local, beyond, behind and bridge passengers, of which only the latter two count as transfer passengers. The transfer share of an airport is then calculated as the sum of this airport’s behind and bridge passengers divided by all departing passengers. Applying this methodology, we estimate transfer passenger numbers and shares for all airports and world regions for the period 2002-2018. The results indicate a declining importance of transfer passengers at the global level; rising transfer volumes and shares in the Middle East region and China, driven by the growth of emerging ChiBoGu (China, Bosporus, Gulf) carriers; decreasing transfer passenger numbers in the U.S., probably due to airline consolidation and hub downsizing activities in the 00s. Finally, key hubs in cities with less touristic appeal like, e.g. Atlanta or Doha, seem to achieve higher transfer shares than gateway hubs in high-profile destinations like Dubai or New York.

Carrier Collaboration with Endogenous Networks: Or, the Limits of What Carrier Collaboration Can Achieve Under Antitrust Immunity

Airlines maintain complex networks that are to large extents complementary. Therefore, some passengers need to change aircraft and airlines to fly from their origin to their final destination. The present study captures pricing problems in terms of double marginalization but goes one step further by incorporating network choices. The model involves a two-stage game with two carriers who choose their complementary networks in the first stage and fares in the second stage. Each carrier’s network involves one or two links that are distributed geographically or distributed in time. If both carriers maintain two links, then transfer passengers can choose between two alternative connections which they consider as imperfect substitutes. There are only transfer passengers, and maintaining a link is costly. The analysis reveals that carrier collaboration and antitrust immunity can eliminate double marginalization and create incentives to extend networks. Our results indicate that the scope for the improvement of carrier networks via antritrust immunity can be rather limited relative to the social desirability of more extensive carrier networks. A possible policy lesson is that airlines should be granted antitrust immunity conditional on network expansion and/or frequency obligations.

Short-Term Passenger Flow Prediction With Decomposition in Urban Railway Systems

Accurate prediction of short-term passenger flow is vital for real-time operations control and management. Identifying passenger demand patterns and selecting appropriate methods are promising to improve prediction accuracy. This paper proposes a hybrid prediction model with time series decomposition and explores its performance for different types of passenger flows with varied characteristics in urban railway systems. The Seasonal and Trend decomposition using Loess (STL) is used to decompose the passenger flow into the seasonal, trend, and residual time series, representing the constant, long-term fluctuant, and stochastic passenger demand patterns. The approximate entropy (ApEn) is utilized to quantify the predictability of each component. After that, the Holt-Winters (HW) method is developed to predict the seasonal and trend components that both with high predictability. The long short-term memory networks (LSTM NN) are proposed to predict the residual with low predictability. The outputs from these models are combined to predict the short-term passenger flow. We assess the model performance with entry, exit, and transfer passenger flows at the target stations, which are selected via the agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) algorithm in the Shanghai Metro. Compared with three representative models, the results show that 1) the decomposition-based hybrid model performs well for both one-step and multi-step predictions in terms of accuracy and robustness; 2) ApEn is useful for choosing appropriate prediction models.

The impact of delays on the welfare effects of on-track competition: The case of transfer passengers with operator-tied tickets

When connecting trains may be missed due to delays, and passengers are insufficiently flexible due to operator-tied ticketing, on-track competition may reduce effective frequency. We analyze passengers who share α−β−γ− preferences for being on time and a price-sensitive demand, but differ in the preferred arrival time. If the probability of missing a connection due to a delay is sufficiently high, both producer and consumer surplus in a duopoly with reduced effective frequency is smaller than in the monopoly case. Apart from reducing unpunctuality, ensuring the transferability of tickets, and switching to competition for the market, may constitute (regulatory) remedies.

Transit timetable synchronization for transfer time minimization

This paper aims to synchronize timetables in a transit network so as to minimize the total passenger transfer waiting time. Assuming a fixed headway for each line, we first formulate the problem as an optimization problem with congruence constraints. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and investigate several special cases of the problem that are solvable in polynomial time. Furthermore, we show that the local search for the general problem is equivalent to the well-studied maximum directed cut problem. As such, we use an approximation algorithm for the maximum directed cut problem to solve the timetable synchronization problem. We assess the quality of the algorithm on a real-world case study, and show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in the literature. Lastly, we relax the fixed headway assumption, and propose an efficient recursive quasi-linear time algorithm to minimize the total transfer waiting time in this general setting.

A New Intelligent Hybrid Control Approach for DC–DC Converters in Zero-Emission Ferry Ships

Nowadays, sea traveling is increasing due to its practicality and low-cost. Ferry boats play a significant role in the marine tourism industry to transfer passengers and tourists. Nevertheless, traditional ferry ships consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to generate the required energy for their motors and demanded loads. Also, by consuming fossil fuels, ferries spatter the atmosphere with CO2 emissions and detrimental particles. In order to address these issues, ferry-building industries try to utilize renewable energy sources (RESs) and energy storage systems (ESSs), instead of fossil fuels, to provide the required power in the ferry boats. In general, full-electric ferry (FEF) boats are a new concept to reduce the cost of fossil fuels and air emissions. Hence, FEF can be regarded as a kind of dc stand-alone microgrid with constant power loads (CPLs). This article proposes a new structure of a FEF ship based on RESs and ESSs. In order to solve the negative impedance induced instabilities in dc power electronic based RESs, a new intelligent single input interval type-2 fuzzy logic controller based on sliding mode control is proposed for the dc-dc converters feeding CLPs. The main feature of the suggested technique is that it is mode-free and regulates the plant without requiring the knowledge of converter dynamics. Finally, we conduct a dSPACE-based real-time experiment to examine the effectiveness of the proposed energy management system for FEF vessels.

Partial Node Failure in Shortest Path Network Problems

This paper investigates the impact of partial node failure from the perspective of shortest path network problems. We propose a network model that we call shortest path network problems for partial node failure, designed to examine the influence of partial node failures in a flow-based network using a set of indicators. The concept of partial node failure was applied to a special type of hub station, a mandatory transfer in subway or railway systems where multiple lines are arranged for the transfer of passengers. Numerical experiments were carried out on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority network (WMATA). The results or analysis detail how changes in flow distribution in the network were measured when a station partially failed, as well as ways of identifying heavily impacted stations with respect to different indicators. Various partial node failure scenarios were simulated for origin–destination (OD) flows by days, providing comprehensive information with which to evaluate plans for partial node failures, such as those related to scheduling maintenance, along with insights with which to make contingent plans for potential closure of stations. A major finding emphasizes that the rankings of station criticality are highly sensitive to the different OD flows by days when partial node failures are assumed in network modeling.

Design of Urban Rail Transit Network Constrained by Urban Road Network, Trips and Land-Use Characteristics

In the process of urban rail transit network design, the urban road network, urban trips and land use are the key factors to be considered. At present, the subjective and qualitative methods are usually used in most practices. In this paper, a quantitative model is developed to ensure the matching between the factors and the urban rail transit network. In the model, a basic network, which is used to define the roads that candidate lines will pass through, is firstly constructed based on the locations of large traffic volume and main passenger flow corridors. Two matching indexes are proposed: one indicates the matching degree between the network and the trip demand, which is calculated by the deviation value between two gravity centers of the stations’ importance distribution in network and the traffic zones’ trip intensity; the other one describes the matching degree between the network and the land use, which is calculated by the deviation value between the fractal dimensions of stations’ importance distribution and the traffic zones’ land-use intensity. The model takes the maximum traffic turnover per unit length of network and the minimum average volume of transfer passengers between lines as objectives. To solve the NP-hard problem in which the variables increase exponentially with the increase of network size, a neighborhood search algorithm is developed based on simulated annealing method. A real case study is carried out to show that the model and algorithm are effective.

Air transport development directions in Ukraine

The purpose of the research. Research of the current state of the domestic air transport market and international experience of state support of this sector, identification of opportunities and threats to its functioning in Ukraine, as well as development of directions for its future development. Methodology. A set of methods used to highlight the theoretical, legal and applied aspects of the operation of the air transport market, namely: methods of generalization, comparison, analysis, synthesis and systematic approach. Results. The role of the air transportation market in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals has been determined. The peculiarities of the development of the international air transportation market are also determined. The current state of the air transportation development is evaluated and the specifics of its state regulation in Ukraine are highlighted. The basic directions of perspective development of the air transportation market in Ukraine are substantiated. Practical meaning. Possibility of using the results of the research by the state authorities in the development of the main directions of support for the development of the domestic air transportation market under the conditions of creating a system of market differentiation into segments of air transportation; use of various forms of interaction; increase in the number of flights due to the creation of transfer passenger flows, transportation in the regions by hub airports (hubs); technical improvement; establishment of a single airport network in conjunction with efficient use of airport property; increase of investment activity of aviation enterprises. Prospects for further research. We see the prospects for further research outlined in the article in the development of mechanisms for the implementation of directions for the future development of the air transport market in Ukraine.

Robust Network-Wide Bus Scheduling With Transfer Synchronizations

Travel time and demand disturbances lead to unreliable bus operations and missed passenger transfers. This study formulates the multi-line synchronization problem as a robust min(i)max problem that considers the fluctuations of the travel and dwell times of bus trips. Given the infeasibility of the multi-line synchronization problem in extreme cases of travel/dwell time disturbances, we introduce a flexible problem formulation that incorporates the constraint violations into the objective function. To produce a robust schedule, the dispatching times of trips are our design variables and the travel and dwell time fluctuations are the environmental variables which have an adversarial role in our minimax problem. We validate our approach in the bus network of The Hague using 1 month of actual vehicle location and passenger counting data. There, we demonstrate the potential improvement in terms of service regularity and increased synchronizations in common case and extreme case conditions.

Last train timetable optimization considering detour routing strategy in an urban rail transit network

As an important means of transportation, urban rail transit provides effective mobility, sufficient punctuality, strong security, and environment-friendliness in large cities. However, this transportation mode cannot offer a 24-h service to passengers with the consideration of operation cost and the necessity of maintenance, that is, a final time should be set. Therefore, operators need to design a last train timetable in consideration of the number of successful travel passengers and the total passenger transfer waiting time. This paper proposes a bi-level last train timetable optimization model. Its upper level model aims to maximize the number of passengers who travel by the last train service successful and minimize their transfer waiting time, and its lower level model aims to determine passenger route choice considering the detour routing strategy based on the last train timetable. A genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the upper level model, and the lower level model is solved by a semi-assignment algorithm. The implementation of the proposed model in the Beijing urban rail transit network proves that the model can optimize not only the number of successful transfer directions and successful travel passengers but also the passenger transfer waiting time of successful transfer directions. The optimization results can provide operators detailed information about the stations inaccessible to passengers from all origin stations and uncommon path guides for passengers of all origin–destination pairs. These types of information facilitate the operation of real-world urban rail transit systems.

OPTIMIZING LIMITED-STOP BUS SERVICES ALONG A PUBLIC TRANSIT CORRIDOR WITH A DIFFERENTIAL FARE STRUCTURE

Limited-stop bus services are a highly efficient way to release more potential of the public transit system to meet travel demand, especially under constraints on vehicle fleet size and transportation infrastructure. This work first proposes a visualized fare table for the design of limited-stop bus services along a public transit corridor, along which many lines of public transit carry a heavy load of demand back and forth every working day. Based on this proposed fare table, a set of fare strategies and desired aims of fare policy, a differentiated fare structure is established to improve social equity and increase revenue. The nature of the structure can help travellers understand how to be charged between their origins and destinations (e.g. flat, time-based, stop-based or quality-based pricing) and then plan their trips efficiently. Secondly, a model is formulated to minimize the total social cost in designing a fixed demand limited-stop bus service system with a differentiated fare structure. Thirdly, numerical results are carried out with sensitivity analysis within three scenarios of differentiated fare structures. It is found that a differentiated fare structure has a great effect on passenger path choice behaviour and resulting optimal design of bus services. An attractive feature of this differentiated fare structure is that it could not only enhance the operator’s revenue and social equity but also reduce passenger transfers and social cost.

환승여객이 인지하는 환승관광 제약요인 연구

The purpose of this study is to identify differences of constraint factors perceived by transfer passengers. Transfer tours as a specialized area of tourism transportation is a niche tourism segment to attract foreign tourists. The motivation for using transfer tourism is to experience the attractiveness of tourism destination during the airport’s stay time. But transfer passengers perceived constraints by infrastructure and environmental factors, psychological factors, and individual structural factors. Even more, there may be differences of perception toward constraints among passengers. Thus, it is worthwhile to investigate the perceived barriers of passengers by the demographic characteristics and tourist behaviors.BR Interestingly, while there are no differences in constraint perception by gender, the experience of transfer tour and travel patterns show statistically significant differences in terms of age and type of residences. The study implies that customized tour products should develop in consideration of age and cultural traits of transfer passengers.

A mathematical model for P-hub median location problem to multiple assignments between non-hub to hub nodes under fuzzy environment

One group of the optimization problems is Hub location problem. Hub facilities are used in transportation network which are provided transfer of products, information, passengers and postal package through of intermediate node instead of direct transfer. One main group of these problems is discrete hub median location that seeks to minimize total transportation cost. In this paper, we present hub median location problem with multiple allocation of non-hub nodes to hub nodes, moreover it is possible to connect non-hub nodes directly with considering a penalty coefficient. The numerical example for CAB25data set -which is related to flow and distance between 25 cities in America- with establishment cost under fuzzy circumstance solved and presented.

New methods for two-door airplane boarding using apron buses

Apron buses are widely employed by European airlines to transfer passengers from airport terminals to airplanes. However, the vast majority of current boarding methods are designed for use with jet-bridges and one-door boarding of airplanes and thus are not well suited for apron buses and passengers boarding simultaneously through both a front door and a back door of an airplane. This study describes and tests 13 new boarding methods that assign each passenger to one of two apron buses—based on the passenger's seat on the airplane. Our simulation platform, developed in NetLogo, investigates the time to complete boarding of the airplane for the boarding methods for varying amounts of luggage carried aboard the plane. The results indicate that the new boarding methods could decrease the boarding time by 5.6%–36.6% compared to the best method previously published in the literature for this context of two apron buses and two-door boarding of airplanes.

A mathematical model for P-hub median location problem to multiple assignments between non-hub to hub nodes under fuzzy environment

One group of the optimization problems is Hub location problem. Hub facilities are used in transportation network which are provided transfer of products, information, passengers and postal package through of intermediate node instead of direct transfer. Methodology: One main group of these problems is discrete hub median location that seeks to minimize total transportation cost. Results: In this paper, we present hub median location problem with multiple allocation of non-hub nodes to hub nodes, moreover it is possible to connect non-hub nodes directly with considering a penalty coefficient. Conclusion: The numerical example for CAB25data set -which is related to flow and distance between 25 cities in America- with establishment cost under fuzzy circumstance solved and presented.