Quantitative assessment of passenger flow influence on train dwell time in Delhi metro

Abstract

In dense rail network countries like India, the operation of the railways are very sensitive even to small perturbations and thus require careful planning and real-time management. Any small disturbance can significantly affect the dwell times in stations and can result in high variability, which becomes hard to predict. This happens due to continuous interactions between the passengers and various components of the railway network during the dwelling process. Recently, with the effect of the pandemic, dwell times are noticed to be longer due to intense scrutiny of the passengers, sanitization of the trains and other similar reasons. Although there are few studies that focused on dwell times of urban transportation across the world, no such research is observed for the Indian context. Also, with the effect of COVID, an increased dwell time of transit systems has been observed. Hence, we wanted to understand the concept of dwell times in the current situations, especially in the Indian context. So, this project aims to study quantitatively how passenger flow influences the dwell time considering uncertain disturbances and how Delhi Metro can better manage the passenger flow and optimize the scheduling of trains in such cases.