Paper Info
Title
Minimising average passenger waiting time in personal rapid transit systems
Abstract
Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is an emerging urban transport mode. A PRT system operates much like a conventional hackney taxi system, except that the vehicles are driven by computer (no human driver) between stations in a dedicated network of guideways. The world’s first two PRT systems began operating in 2010 and 2011. In both PRT and taxi systems, passengers request immediate service; they do not book ahead. Perfect information about future requests is therefore not available, but statistical information about future requests is available from historical data. If the system does not use this statistical information to position empty vehicles in anticipation of future requests, long passenger waiting times result, which makes the system less attractive to passengers, but using it gives rise to a difficult stochastic optimisation problem. This paper develops three lower bounds on achievable mean passenger waiting time, one based on queuing theory, one based on the static problem, in which it is assumed that perfect information is available, and one based on a Markov Decision Process model. An evaluation of these lower bounds, together with a practical heuristic developed previously, in simulation shows that these lower bounds can often be nearly attained, particularly when the fleet size is large. The results also show that low waiting times and high utilisation can be simultaneously obtained when the fleet size is large, which suggests important economies of scale.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/s10479-013-1492-3
Annals of Operations Research
Keywords
Field
DocType
Personal rapid transit,Empty vehicle redistribution,Taxi,Queuing model,Markov decision process,Waiting time
Personal rapid transit,Heuristic,Operations research,Markov decision process,Queueing theory,Perfect information,Economies of scale,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
236
2
0254-5330
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.87
13
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
john leesmiller1111.21