A multimodal transportation system: Hybrid Petri net-based modeling and simulation

The paper deals with the modeling and simulation of a public transportation system wherein passengers need to use more than one transportation mode for their moving. Many studies have been developed in the literature for such problematic, and many modeling tools are proposed. In this paper we focus on the use of hybrid Petri nets (HPN) and the mathematical techniques they propose for performance evaluation and minimization of passengers waiting times in connection stations. HPN is used as an adequate formal tool to model both continuous and discrete behavior of the considered system. The continuous behavior corresponds to the exchange of the passenger flows between two different transportation modes (bus and train). The discrete behavior represents the moving of transportation entities on their own lines. The system is evaluated and analyzed using the fundamental equation and its evolution is studied using IB-State techniques in HPN. The proposed approach is illustrated with a numerical example.