Study on necessary dwell time according to number of boarding and alighting passengers

In high-density urban railways, dwell time will dramatically increase when train delays occur. The main reason for increased dwell time is passengers boarding and alighting. Therefore, train simulators that interface with passenger flows, have been recently developed. The aim of this paper is to estimate the necessary dwell time, minimum dwell time required for the same number of passengers boarding and alighting. We found that necessary dwell time has fewer variations than dwell time. Therefore, necessary dwell time more explicitly identifies the effects caused by passengers. We developed regression models to estimate the necessary dwell time by train and platform types. Tested on Seoul Metro Line 9, these models were statistically significant. Express train at a station which has island-platform needs more necessary dwell time than local train with side-platform.