Method and Software Tool for an Optimized Passenger Orientated Connection Management

The trust of the customers in adherence to their expectation to a transport service determines the modal split of the passenger transport. Therefore it has to be a goal for each public transport operation company to maintain and to improve the customer’s trust. An important service criteria by a customer accepted public transport offer is the travel time. The travel time depends on the running time, the dwell time, etc., but also on the number of transfer procedures and the transfer waiting time. One of the essential research problems in the surroundings of the connection planning is the question under which condition it is appropriate for the planning of a connection. An important aspect to answer this question is the evaluation of the additional total travel time for all involved passengers in consideration of an achieved (additional travel time for transit passengers in the connecting vehicle) or not achieved (additional travel time for transfer passengers in the feeder vehicle) connection. This paper develops a new method of an optimized passenger orientated connection management during the planning process (scheduled timetable). The goal is to minimize the additional travel time in consideration of a planned or not planned connection based on the number of all involved passengers. At first it is necessary to identify all influencing variables. After that all boundary conditions will be modeled by using the graph theory. With an adequate shortest path algorithm it is possible to generate connection strategies specific for stations, lines or the whole networks. Particularities of railway operation (e.g. turn around times, operating fleet, timetable interval, conflicts, infrastructure bottlenecks) also can been considered in the model. For the practical use was developed the software tool ANPLA which is helpful for operating companies or for the timetable construction to solve the set of problems in the surroundings of the connection management. Furthermore the paper includes approaches for a web based application.