Passenger route choice in case of disruptions

Abstract

The passengers of railway transport systems occasionally need to deal with disruptions. In such situations, perfect information, for example about the duration of the disruption, is usually not available. As a result, passengers need to make decisions on the continuation of their journey in a highly uncertain context. In this paper, we introduce the passenger waiting problem, which allows us to analyze whether a passenger should wait for a disruption to resolve or start traveling along a detour. We present an implementation of our approach that runs efficiently on modern smartphones and apply it to a number of illustrative examples inspired by realistic situations.