Analysis of vehicle behavior at a merging section of APM system with different strategies

This paper considers the merging section of an APM (automated people mover), which is an approach to the new traffic system. The behavior of the vehicles at the merging section is modeled, and the situation, when different strategies are adopted, is analyzed using the technique of Markov chain. An APM system is considered, where the vehicles in the system do not always run individually, but sometimes run in the form of a train. This paper attempts to point out the essential dependencies of the vehicle behavior on the control strategy. It is assumed that the vehicles arrive individually. The basic idea of the control strategy is that the individually incoming vehicles are connected at the merging section. Thus the vehicle capacity of the outgoing line from the merging section is equivalently increased. As the result of analysis, the relations among the arriving traffic of the vehicles in two incoming lines, the average waiting time of the vehicles in the individual lines, the average number of connected vehicles in a train, and the density of train operations are derived explicitly. The dependencies of the average waiting time of the vehicle and the outflow traffic density of the train on different control strategies are examined.