The effect of waiting area design at the metro platform on passengers' alighting and boarding behaviors

The efficiency of alighting and boarding plays an important role in station service level, train timetable making, etc. This paper proposes an improved social force model to investigate the effect of waiting area design at the metro platform on passengers' alighting and boarding behaviors. Train timetable is considered for the description of the desired speed, and the desired direction is determined depending on different spatial partitioning of train door. Simulation results show that the design of waiting area indeed affects the alighting and boarding efficiency. With the change of civilization degree, and the number of boarding passengers and alighting passengers, the most frequently used type I waiting areas show more advantages than the type II waiting area in reducing the total travel time and the probability of deadlock in most conditions, which reflects that it would be best to adopt the type I waiting areas in the practical design. Moreover, the travel efficiency achieves the highest when passengers fully comply the rule of alighting first, which further indicates that compliance with civilized rules is more conducive to traffic and should be encouraged. This study can provide theoretical supports for the design of metro platform, thereby improving the station service level. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.