A boarding model for heterogeneous passengers on the platform of high-speed railway station

Boarding behavior on the platform of high-speed railway (HSR) station, as a critical problem that has not been fully explored and understood, is investigated in this paper. An extended cellular automaton (CA) model is proposed to study the impacts of passengers' heterogeneities during the boarding process. Some numerical tests are conducted to explore the passengers' movements and the complex traffic phenomena (e.g., passenger's detour behavior, local congestion and overtaking behavior) on the platform. The numerical results show that the proportion of the passengers carrying luggage has significant impacts on the boarding process (e.g., the degree of congestion, inflow rate at the entrance and route choice). Moreover, the heterogeneous speeds increase the total boarding time and decrease the boarding efficiency comparing with the homogenous speeds. The above results are helpful for the effective management of pedestrian flow on the HSR platform and the optimal design of HSR platform layout.