How a Game Theoretic Approach Can Minimize the Cost of Train Passenger Services: An Intermodal Competition between Rail and Road Transport

Tryson Yangailo — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Game theory models provide very powerful tools for evaluating strategies that are beneficial to both rail and road operators competing for passengers on parallel routes. This study examines how game theory can help rail operators who are incurring losses on passenger transport to identify strategies that can minimise costs, using the methodology of dual linear programming to analyse strategies. In identifying the best strategies for minimising costs for the railway operator, the best strategies for maximising profits for the road operators are also identified. The game model is set up between two passenger transport operators (rail and road) and is based on the income earned by the road operators from passengers. This study illustrates the following: how the strategies of the two competitors (rail and road) are determined; the formation of the payoff matrix and the presentation of the mathematical problem for the two competitors; and the results and verification of the best strategies for both competitors. The Leonid Hurwicz criterion was used to verify the optimal strategies.

Pedestrian Crowd Management Experiments: A Data Guidance Paper

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Understanding pedestrian dynamics and the interaction of pedestrians with their environment is crucial to the safe and comfortable design of pedestrian facilities. Experiments offer the opportunity to explore the influence of individual factors. In the context of the project CroMa (Crowd Management in transport infrastructures), experiments were conducted with about 1000 participants to test various physical and social psychological hypotheses focusing on people's behaviour at railway stations and crowd management measures. The following experiments were performed: i) Train Platform Experiment, ii) Crowd Management Experiment, iii) Single-File Experiment, iv) Personal Space Experiment, v) Boarding and Alighting Experiment, vi) Bottleneck Experiment and vii) Tiny Box Experiment. This paper describes the basic planning and implementation steps, outlines all experiments with parameters, geometries, applied sensor technologies and pre- and post-processing steps. All data can be found in the pedestrian dynamics data archive.

Collective Dynamics

How a Game Theoretic Approach Can Minimize the Cost of Train Passenger Services: An Intermodal Competition between Rail and Road Transport

Pedestrian Crowd Management Experiments: A Data Guidance Paper