A Study of a Merging Section of PRT System with Bulk Arrival and its Control Strategy

This paper deals with a merging section of Personal Rapid Transit system with bulk arrival. Vehicles arrive at a merging section from a main line and a sub line. In most of the previous studies on PRT system, vehicles on the main line have priority. Then, a queue is formed only on the sub line. In this situation, the queuing delay on the sub line may become extremely long. We propose a control strategy whereby vehicles on the main line are not stopped in normal situation; vehicles on the main line are only stopped when the number of waiting vehicles on the sub line exceeds some specific number. This specific number is a sort of threshold. Thus, queues are formed on the main line and the sub line, respectively. Both of the queuing delays are controlled with the threshold. The optimal value of the threshold can be obtained by analyzing the stochastic model. By the optimal value, we can set the rate of queuing delay between the main and sub lines to an arbitrary rate.