A framework for modelling the ripple effect of crowding at public transport facilities

Many studies can be found successfully applying sophisticated and powerful pedestrian simulation packages for crowd management at public transport stations. However, there are gaps in understanding the ripple effect of crowding and passenger demands at a station to the crowdedness at stations further down a transit line. This paper reports a computational framework that links crowd simulations at transit stations of an urban network. Inherently the framework allows for the simulation of the transferring of mobility characteristics of passengers along a transit line as they travel from one station to another and its impacts on crowdedness at these stations. We also report on a proof of concept demonstrating the application of the framework to a small hypothetical train network. The crowd simulation software used in this study is MassMotion. However, the framework should be adaptable to any crowd simulation package.