Assessing Coordination of Pedestrian Facilities in Metro Station Based on Queuing Network

The coordination of pedestrian facilities is the basis of design and operation for a Metro station, as it directly determines the final capacity of the whole station. All types of pedestrian facilities used in a Metro station, which can be categorized into three types (servicing facilities, passing facilities, and distributing facilities), are considered in this paper. Models based on queuing theory are established according to facility type. Fixed-and dynamic-service time models are proposed to simulate the servicing facilities; two-stage G/G(n)/C/C models are built for passing facilities; G/G(n)/C/C and G/G/C/C models are designed for distributing facilities. Next, a simulation model based on queuing network theory is designed to estimate the coordination among different pedestrian facilities in the metro station. The Simulink platform was used to run the simulation. Lastly, the data of Hujialou station in Beijing was collected to validate the models. The results demonstrate that the newly developed model is efficiently able to estimate bottlenecks and the coordination of facilities, which has great significance in pre-and post-evaluation for metro station facilities design and performance.