Development and Evaluation of Traffic Management Strategies for Personal Rapid Transit

This paper describes a simulation study of traffic management opportunities with an extended Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) network at Heathrow airport. The investigation was based on the Citymobil reference scenario of the Heathrow airport PRT Demonstrator between Terminal 5 and a car park, but modified to allow investigation of a wider area including links to Terminal 1 to 3 and car parks. A predictive demand management strategy was identified to be incorporated in both local vehicle dispatching and wide network operation. The impacts of the proposed management strategy were evaluated using a microscopic PRT simulation model – Hermes which was specially modified for this research by the developer. Simulation results suggested a significant reduction in average waiting time across all stations in the test network as a result of the implementation of the proposed traffic management strategy. Despite the fact that PRT is a demand responsive service with its operation optimised through a control algorithm, this investigation has shown that the service level can be further improved by incorporating traffic management measures such as demand prediction.