A Practical Approach to Assess the Design of Urban Transit Vehicles using Microscopic Simulations

The design of urban transit vehicles is a key component which determines the Overall capacity of a line in public transportation. Hence, optimizing the process of boarding and alighting as well as passenger flows inside a vehicle is of vital importance. Vehicle Designers need to assess and compare their design choices by predicting passenger flows in typical situations. Since field tests involving real or mock-up vehicles are expensive in terms of costs and time, microscopic simulations have proven to be a valuable tool. In this paper we demonstrate simulation methods that allow for investigating passenger flows in different designs of urban transit vehicles. Together with BOMBARDIER Transportation LRV, we applied our simulation methods on three different vehicle layouts and discuss which information can be extracted based on several graphical representations. Our modeling approach implements passenger movement behavior for boarding and alighting processes on the operational, tactical and strategic level. The model also includes representations for the movement behavior of mobility restricted passengers such as persons in wheelchairs or with baby strollers. We validated our simulation results against measurements of crowd flows obtained from experiments and real world observations.