Station Ticket Booth Capacity Analysis with Arena

Passenger congestion before departure times at railway stations creates significant service bottlenecks. In this study, passenger arrival distributions, queue lengths, and server processing times were modeled in Rockwell Arena to analyze stochastic queuing dynamics and evaluate capacity improvements.

Problem

Severe passenger wait times during peak departure hours and underutilization during off-peak periods due to static booth allocation.

Approach

• Passenger inter-arrival times and booth processing times at the station were recorded via field observations.
• Theoretical probability distributions of passenger arrival and service times (Poisson arrivals, Erlang / Lognormal service) were fitted with Arena Input Analyzer.
• An Arena discrete-event simulation was built on M/M/s and M/G/s queueing models.
• Kiosk routing and flexible booth-opening scenarios were run.

Step by step

1. 01

   Field Data Collection & Distribution Analysis

   Passenger arrival frequency at booths and processing times by ticket type were measured; suitable distributions were fitted with Input Analyzer.

2. 02

   Arena Booth Simulation Model Setup

   Passenger queue, booth staff (Resource), and ticketing logic (Process) blocks were designed.

3. 03

   Bottleneck & Queue Analysis

   The average number of waiting passengers and wait times during peak hours were examined via animated simulation.

4. 04

   Scenario Comparisons (What-If)

   Outputs of kiosk activation, single-queue-multi-booth systems, and flexible staff allocation scenarios were compared.

Results and impact

• Average passenger queue wait time was reduced by 38%.
• Simulation proved kiosks reduced booth load by 45%.
• A flexible booth-opening schedule aligned with staff shift plans was created for station management.

The strategic importance of ticket kiosks in resolving physical booth bottlenecks was substantiated with simulation data.

System architecture

Backend

Rockwell Arena Simulation Engine, Process Analyzer

Frontend

2D Visual Animation Grid, Simulation Performance Dashboard

Integrations

Arena Input Analyzer, Queueing Theory Mathematical Model

Takeaways

The stochastic nature of passenger behavior's effect on booth queues was modeled firsthand.