Effects of Travel Demand Levels on Optimal Strategies for Metro System Management in Failure Contexts

In this paper, we investigate the effects of different fleet compositions on travel demand in the case of metro system breakdowns (such as reductions in train performance or unavailability of a rail convoy or a track section), in order to provide a Decision Support System (DSS) which allows the decision-maker to estimate the increase in travel and waiting times of passengers, and thus identify the optimal intervention strategy to adopt so as to minimise their discomfort. In particular, we adopt a micro-simulation model of the metro system to estimate the behaviour of passengers waiting on the platform and apply the proposed methodology in the case of a real-dimension network.