Simulation Modeling For Passengers' Ticket Buying Behavior Of High-speed Railway

Passengers' ticket buying behavior is the key process of matching railway's ticket supply with passengers' travel demand.For passengers,travel demand is achieved through ticket buying process and rational utilization of capacity,multiple operational achievement as well as revenue income are realized through ticketing process for railway companies.Ticket allocation is a crucial work in the process of ticketing organization for railway companies to achieve a rational distribution of the main product of passenger railway transportation,i.e.,ticket,which determines the correlation between passengers' travel demand and resource supply of railway.Faced with the drastic market competition and diversified travel demand of passengers,railway companies need to transform its business mode towards "demand-driven".Therefore,the research on passengers travel behavior,especially ticket buying behavior is more than important.This paper focus on ticket buying behavior of High-Speed Railway(HSR)passengers,conducted a study of simulation modeling for passengers'ticket buying behavior through the booking horizon.The main work of this paper is as follows:(1)Analysis of passengers' buying process as well as the choice behavior of ticket buying.An in-depth analysis of ticket buying process was firstly conducted,and a choice behavior survey was designed to collect and analyze the characteristics of passengers' choice behavior on the basis of possible scenarios that passengers may encounter in the ticket buying process.(2)Analysis of booking lineage curve.This paper analyzed the ticket buying behavior of HSR passengers,and the emphasis was on the analytical method of passengers' booking patterns.Booking lineage curves were generated and some general booking patterns were summarized,providing scientific basis for the research of passengers' ticket buying demand forecasting.(3)Simulation modeling for passengers' ticket buying behavior of HSR.Based on the analysis of passengers' ticket buying process.this paper designed the simulation model for passengers' ticket buying behavior of HSR.Taking booking lineage curves,decision parameters of passengers' ticket buying process and ticket supply as inputs,the proposed model produced passengers' ticketing outcomes,i.e.,the matching between flow and trains,under diverse ticket allocation schemes.(4)The work of ticket allocation was introduced,and the proposed model was applied to a case study under the background of Beijing-Guangzhou-Shenzhen HSR and proved to be valid and workable.Suggestions on the improvement of ticket allocation scheme were addressed based on the simulation result of passengers' ticket buying behavior.