Walk the Line: Optimizing the Layout Design of Moving Walkways

Nils Boysen (), Dirk Briskorn () and Stefan Schwerdfeger ()
Additional contact information
Nils Boysen: Department of Operations Management, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany
Dirk Briskorn: Production and Logistics, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, 42119 Wuppertal, Germany
Stefan Schwerdfeger: Department of Operations Management, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany; Department of Management Science, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany

Transportation Science, 2021, vol. 55, issue 4, 908-929

Abstract: A moving walkway (also denoted as moving sidewalk, travelator, autowalk, pedestrian conveyor, or skywalk) is a slow moving conveyor that transports standing or walking people horizontally over a short to medium distance. Constantly moving walkways have a long-lasting tradition especially inside large buildings, such as airport terminals and railway stations. Novel technological developments allow to accelerate walkways in their middle sections up to 12 km/h, while still providing a safe and much slower entrance and exit. Furthermore, first applications of moving walkways as environmentally friendly and space-efficient alternatives for urban public transport exist. In this context, our paper aims to support the layout design of moving walkways with optimization. Given a straight corridor (e.g., an airport terminal) and the passenger flows within the corridor (e.g., among gates), we aim to optimally place bidirectional walkway segments. We show that the resulting optimization problem is efficiently solvable by dynamic programming even if multiple relevant extensions, such as multiple objectives, budget constraints, and minimum safety distances, among subsequent segments are relevant. We apply our algorithm to explore the impact of constantly moving and accelerating walkways on total travel times and benchmark solutions without walkway support in a real-world case study. Our results reveal that wrongly placed walkways may considerably slow down passenger transport, but a very simple design rule leads to near-optimal results.

Keywords: urban logistics; people transport; moving walkways; dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2021.1051 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ortrsc:v:55:y:2021:i:4:p:908-929

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().