Statistical distribution and analysis of secondary queue of railway passengers

S.M. Qasim and Jamal A. Farooquie

International Journal of Operational Research, 2023, vol. 48, issue 3, 382-396

Abstract: Millions of passengers commute through trains in India every day. Still, thousands of waitlisted tickets are cancelled due to the non-availability of accommodation in the desired train on a particular day. Such cancellations result in dissatisfaction and discomfort to the waitlisted ticket holders and loss of business to Indian Railways. The queue of waitlisted ticket holders, called secondary queue, form when the berths in demand are less than the number of berths available in the desired class of accommodation in a particular train on a specific date. The small number of passengers from this queue are served with confirmed tickets surrendered by the passenger from the primary queue holding confirmed tickets. This paper, a portion of a larger study, attempts to identify the statistical distribution of arrivals and service for the secondary queue. Stationarity and interdependence have been examined for inter-arrival time and service time in context of sleeper (SL) class accommodation of Vaishali superfast express train. It has been found that the secondary queue of the Indian Railways advanced reservation passenger system follows the G/G/C/K model of queuing theory. The results are expected to help the Indian Railways determine various queue parameters and hence optimise the system.

Keywords: railway reservation; primary queue; secondary queue; statistical distribution; stationarity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=134778 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijores:v:48:y:2023:i:3:p:382-396

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Operational Research from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().