Vehicle behavior at a merging section of an automated transit system with a randomly varying arrival rate

This paper considers the merging section of the automated transit system which is a new transportation method. The behavior of the vehicle when the arrival rate of the vehicle of one of the lines varies is analyzed by the Markov chain technique. In past studies of the merging section, the case in which the arrival rate of the vehicle is kept constant in time is the one considered most of the time. When, however, some control is exerted on the vehicle traffic before the merging section, the arrival rate of the vehicle at the merging section will not be kept constant. This paper aims at a strategy considering the arrival rate variation of the vehicle and analyzes the situation in the merging section when the ensemble of the arrival from one of the lines exhibits a variation of the state as a Markov chain. To analyze the vehicle behavior in such a model for the merging section, the state variable is defined and formulated considering the classes of the ensemble of the arriving vehicle. From the analysis results, the effect of the variation of the vehicle arrival rate on the queueing delay through the merging section is described.