Analysis and Evaluation of Passenger Flow at the Next Generation Station Using Microscopic Simulations

Abstract

The impact of mankind’s change of climate system and ecosystem is evident. Nonetheless the society’s need for mobility is still growing. Having these points in mind a transformation of mobility from fossil fuel based to renewable energy based is required. The German government is giving great hope on railways as a mode of transport implementing one aspect of this transformation. A growing number of passengers poses a tremendous challenge of the railway infrastructure, since nowadays train stations already reach their capacity limit at peak times. A train concept developed by the German Aerospace Center called Next Generation Train is one answer to this challenge. In this paper, we evaluate the performance regarding passenger flow of the corresponding station called Next Generation Station. To this end, we implemented a microscopic simulation of the Next Generation Station with input parameters such as expected number of passengers, walking speed distribution and dimension of passengers. The transfer time of passengers serves as key performance indicator during the simulation. We compare this transfer time with the reference value for train stations adopted by the German Rail. The methodology developed in this paper can be transferred to existing train stations.