NWO grant for study on passenger behaviour in public transport


Professors <link people peter-vervest _self>Peter Vervest and <link people leo-kroon _self>Leo Kroon have been awarded a grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to carry out their project titled Complexity in Public Transport (ComPuTr).

The ComPuTr project will allow two PhD students to study complexity problems in public transport and to prepare their PhD theses based on this research. One PhD student will focus on revenue management, and the other will study disruption management. This project is one of the 14 projects (out of a total number of 70) that were awarded by NWO within their larger Complexity programme.

Research focus

The focus of the research is on how to analyse and model passenger behaviour in public transport, and how to take this behaviour into account most effectively, both in the planning stage and in disrupted real-time operations. This multi-disciplinary project is carried out in cooperation with Netherlands Railways (NS). It builds upon previous joint research of Erasmus University and NS on revenue management and railway logistics (timetabling rolling stock circulation, and crew scheduling). Important complexity aspects that are studied within this research project are the following:

  1. the micro-macro view: from individual passenger behaviour to aggregated passenger flows; 
  2. the understanding of public transport systems as complex networks;
  3. the predictability of passenger behaviour and flows.

Leo Kroon on the ComPuTr project

<link people leo-kroon _self>Leo Kroon, project leader: “The recent adoption of smart cards and mobile phone technologies in public transport provides ample opportunities to understand passenger behaviour in far more precision than previously possible. This research project studies the complexity of emergent passenger behaviour in public transport, especially the passengers’ sensitivity to strategic and real-time changes in public transport systems. It also examines how the resulting understanding can be used to achieve a win-win result for passengers and for public transport operators. A better insight in the passenger flows will allow allocating capacity at those locations where it is needed. Moreover, the passenger flows may be adjusted to some extent so that the match between capacity and demand is improved even further. Understanding passenger behaviour in public transport will be helpful also in mitigating the adverse consequences of disruptions for the passengers, such as delays and uncertainty.”