Assessment of passenger management strategies within major railway terminals

This paper addresses the problem of passenger flow management in major public transport terminals by proposing a new modeling approach for passenger flows management. Currently, passenger management is done based on the experience of station managers, while existing models generally view the passenger flows as continuous. In contrast, this research proposes modeling the flows of passengers as discrete, according to the behavior of passengers in major transport terminals with non-fixed platform allocation. The problem is modeled as mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) inspired by the alternative graph (AG) model. The case study results show that the model can be used to assess and compare passenger management strategies, for instance, the morning peak case study results show that 578 s of conflict which occur in one strategy can be traded off with 78 s of total tardiness by applying a different strategy. This model can be used to support station managers in assessing complex situations before making management decisions.