Comparison of static vehicle flow assignment methods and microsimulations for a personal rapid transit network

This article describes a static assignment method for a class of emerging public transport systems called personal rapid transit (PRT). PRT is a fully automated public transportation system where small-size vehicles run on exclusive guideways. Because of its automated, on-demand service, PRT must be able to automatically reroute empty vehicles after use to supply stations with waiting passengers. Consequently, any PRT traffic assignment must take into account the flow of empty vehicles as well as the flow of vehicles with passengers. The PRT assignment methods described in this work are based on linear programming models. One of the assignment methods has been applied to a realistic PRT network, and the statically assigned flows have been compared with averaged link flows produced by a PRT microsimulation. It is shown that the proposed static assignment method is not only useful to identify capacity bottlenecks of the planned PRT network but also serves to benchmark the microsimulator’s vehicle management algorithms.