An information integration approach for waiting room management in high speed railway stations

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-08-2016-0027
Pages45-54
Date20 February 2017
Published date20 February 2017
AuthorDing-you Lei,Feng Niu,Ying-gui Zhang
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Library & information services,Lending,Document delivery,Collection building & management,Stock revision,Consortia
An information integration approach for
waiting room management in high speed
railway stations
Ding-you Lei, Feng Niu and Ying-gui Zhang
School of Traffic and Transportation Engineering, Central South University, Hunan Changsha, China
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to propose a systematic approach to facilitate passenger flow in high speed rail (HSR) stations. A case study is conducted
to validate the approach.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper argues that HSR station management consists of train management, station capacity management,
waiting room management and passenger flow management, and that two-way and dynamic information exchange exists among the components.
Accordingly, the proposed approach integrates the components in HSR station management based on information exchange and heuristic algorithms.
A HSR station in China with four regular waiting rooms, one mother-and-infant waiting room and one VIP waiting room located on two floors are
chosen for a case study. An arrangement plan for waiting zones and waiting rooms is generated by following the proposed approach.
Findings – The result of the case study indicates that the proposed approach is capable of arranging waiting zones and waiting rooms quickly and
effectively to maximize utilization of waiting room capacity and to minimize passenger walking distance from waiting rooms to platforms.
Research limitations/implications – The management problem of railway station waiting room also relates to some other factors such as
platforms, tracks adjustment and delay of the trains. As an emerging technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to offer promising solutions
to transform the operation and role of many existing industrial systems such as transportation systems including railway systems. The future study
of the authors will focus on IoT intelligent railway management system.
Practical implications – The result indicates that the proposed method is an effective solution to the management of railway station waiting room,
which can be applied to railway station management system.
Social implications – China Railway System provides service to billions of passengers. This research has significant social-economic impacts.
Originality/value – This paper fulfills an information integrated approach for improving waiting room management in high speed railway stations
and a case study testing the approach.
Keywords IoT, Industrial information integration, Information integration, Railway station, Waiting room, Waiting zone
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
High speed rail (HSR) is a successful alternative to air and
road travel over distances of 400-600 kilometers. It has
developed both nationally and internationally, especially in
Europe and China (Vickerman, 2015). According to Liu et al.
(2016), HSR operates a total mileage of 23,600 kilometers in
2015 in China and by 2020 China’s HSR operating mileage
will reach 30,000 kilometers covering more than 80 per cent of
the cities in China.
Railway station is a facility where trains regularly stop to
load or unload passengers and/or goods. As a crucial
component in HSR systems, stations have been used as the
catalyst for urban redevelopment in many cities, and there are
some obvious successes (Vickerman, 2015). However, with
the rapid development of HSR, passengers in HSR stations
have been very crowded (Tang et al., 2017). Accordingly,
HSR station management has attracted much attention in
academia and industry in recent years. Scholars have studied
HSR station management from diverse perspectives, such as
the utilization of platforms (Chakroborty and Vikram, 2008;
Craey and Craville, 2003;Sels et al., 2014), railway track
assignment (Lusby et al., 2011), station path selection (Lusby
et al., 2011), train shunting (Jacobsen and Pisinger, 2011),
instant modification (Törnquist, 2012) and robustness issue
of station layout (Dewilde et al., 2014;Odijk, 1999). These
research focus on scheduling and platform design and regard
them as individually factors in HSR station management. A
systematic and integrative approach is missing.
Dewilde et al. (2013) propose an approach to cope with the
interaction between routing decisions, timetabling and
platform assignments for the purpose of fully exploiting the
potential of the available capacity of complex train stations.
Their paper proposes a systematic approach for optimizing
HRS station waiting room management from the perspective
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2398-6247.htm
Information Discovery and Delivery
45/1 (2017) 45–54
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2398-6247]
[DOI 10.1108/IDD-08-2016-0027]
The work described in this paper is supported by grants from National
Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 71501190 and 71371193).
Received 28 August 2016
Revised 23 November 2016
Accepted 26 November 2016
45

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