Interchange stations are essential for a high-quality public transport system. Many passengers pass through a station during the course of a day and the time spent at a station has a large effect on their experience of the whole journey. In this study, we aim to improve the passenger experience at a bus terminal by minimizing the walking distances for all passengers. To this end, an integer linear optimization model which allocates bus lines to the stops of a bus terminal is presented. The model is tested in a numerical experiment using synthetic passenger data. Two alternative approaches, either randomly allocated or based on the number of non-transferring passengers, are used for comparisons. The average improvement in relation to the random allocation strategy is 13%, which shows that the allocation approach has potential. It is thus of interest to collect data from a real bus terminal to further explore the model and the potential benefits it can provide.

Microscopic simulation of pedestrian traffic is an important and increasingly popular method to evaluate the performance of existing or proposed infrastructure. The social force model is a common model in simulations, describing the dynamics of pedestrian crowds given the goals of the simulated pedestrians encoded as their preferred velocities. The main focus of the literature has so far been how to choose the preferred velocities to produce realistic dynamic route choices for pedestrians moving through congested infrastructure. However, limited attention has been given the problem of choosing the preferred velocity to produce other behaviors, such as waiting, commonly occurring at, e.g., public transport interchange stations. We hypothesize that: (1) the inclusion of waiting pedestrians in a simulated scenario will significantly affect the level of service for passing pedestrians, and (2) the details of the waiting model affect the predicted level of service, that is, it is important to choose an appropriate model of waiting. We show that the treatment of waiting pedestrians have a significant impact on simulations of pedestrian traffic. We do this by introducing a series of extensions to the social force model to produce waiting behavior, and provide predictions of the model extensions that highlight their differences. We also present a sensitivity analysis and provide sufficient criteria for stability. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Efficient interchange stations, where travelers are changing lines and/or travel modes, are essential for the functionality of the whole public transport system. By studying pedestrian movements, the level of service and effectiveness imposed by the design of the interchange station can be evaluated. We address the problem by microsimulation, where a social force model is used for the phenomenological description of pedestrian interactions. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of measures describing the density, delay, acceleration and discomfort for pedestrian flows. Simulation experiments are performed for the movements in two canonical pedestrian areas, a corridor and a corridor intersection. Clearly, each of the four measures gives a description for how pedestrians impede each other, and hence for the efficiency at the facility. There is, however, different information provided by each measure, and we conclude that they all are well-motivated for quantifying the level of service in a pedestrian flow. We also illustrate the outcome for a railway platform, with two trains arriving in parallel.

In force based models of pedestrian traffic, the relaxation time, τ, is related to the time it takes a pedestrian to adapt its motion to its preferences. An example of this is linear acceleration, but τ is also connected to how the agent adjusts to spatial variations in its preferred velocity, and affects evasive maneuvers. These many roles of τ may be a problem when calibrating force based models.

We compare linear acceleration, to new data on, and simulations of, turning movements. The results indicate that the models predict drifting of a magnitude that is not supported by the data.

Walking is an environmentally friendly and important mode of transportation. It constitutes the first and last part of almost any trip, regardless of what the main mode of transport is, and is especially important in connection to public transport trips.

When designing public transport stations, and similar facilities with large and varying volumes of pedestrian traffic, it is advantageous to be able to predict the traffic conditions at the facility before it is built; discovering too late that the traffic at the facility is inefficient and perceived as uncomfortable may be very costly. To make these predictions we need accurate quantitative models of pedestrian traffic.

The foundation of this thesis is the development of a microsimulation platform for pedestrian traffic, the Pedestrian Traffic Simulation Platform (FTSP). The platform is based on the Social Force Model (SFM) and intended for evaluation of proposed designs of pedestrian facilities. A contribution of this thesis is a thorough documentation of the implementation of the FTSP.

An extensive literature review of previous research on the SFM revealed gaps in the methodology used to study the properties of the SFM and to interpret its results. This thesis proposes local performance measures to fill this gap. These measures are based on properties of the SFM, and enable quantitative analyses of the quality of service at pedestrian facilities. The proposed measures are applied to the simulation results of some basic scenarios, which reveal previously unknown properties of the SFM. These properties can be used to test the accuracy of the SFM.

Another gap in the literature was how to include waiting behavior in the SFM. This thesis shows that accurate modeling of waiting pedestrians is important for the accuracy of the simulation results, and proposes three different extensions to the SFM to model waiting behavior.

Efficient interchange stations, where travelers are changing lines and/or travel modes, are essential for the functionality of the whole public transport system. By studying pedestrian movements, the level of service and effectiveness imposed by the design of the interchange station can be evaluated.

We address the problem by microsimulation, where a social force model is used for the phenomenological description of pedestrian interactions. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of measures describing the density, delay, acceleration and discomfort for pedestrian flows.

Simulation experiments are performed for the movements in two canonical pedestrian areas, a corridor and a corridor intersection. Clearly, each of the four measures gives a description for how pedestrians impede each other, and hence for the efficiency at the facility. There is, however, different information provided by each measure, and we conclude that they all are well-motivated for quantifying the level of service in a pedestrian flow. We also illustrate the outcome for a railway platform, with two trains arriving in parallel.