Public transportation systems: modeling and analysis based on a new Petri net approach

Several efforts have been centered on the improving of the quality of service of public transportation in order to face the increasing demand. Consequently, in the latest decade, a growing body of advances concerning several aspects of the public transportation planning process has appeared in the operations research literature. Some classes of Petri net (PN) are used for the graphical description, the analysis of flows and the control in the studied systems. Due to the characteristics of the public transportation systems, PN models of such systems are very complex. To overcome this inconvenience, we introduce a new class of PN. This allows the modeling and the analysis of complex public transportation systems. This particular class of PN is described and defined and we show that it has interesting properties. We illustrate the interest of such a tool with a line planning problem for which several line architectures are possible and one has to choose the best one.