Design of Passenger Information System and Smart Passenger Crowdedness Avoidance: Case of AALRT

Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit is playing a prominent role in alleviating the city's transportation problem. Currently, it only has an onboard passenger information system, and there is no wayside passenger information system. Consequently, passengers waiting at the station are unable to know if a train is coming, the estimated arrival time of the train, the crowdedness level on the train and whether the train is single or coupled. The other challenge is that on pick hours there exist a high passenger crowdedness on the trains which makes the service unintentionally unfair as only who can survive the high congestion on the train use the service. The primary objective of this thesis is to avoid the existing passenger information system problems of Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit by devising a reliable passenger information system and come up with a cost-effective solution for the current passenger over crowdedness problem. Hence, a passenger information system was designed by developing a website, an Android application and station displays which will all show the available space on the next train, the number of passengers expected to get off on that station, and its estimated remaining time of arrival. The simulation result showed that we achieved the stated objective as it can give detail information about the train for each passengers waiting at the stations. In addition to this, we introduced a passenger overcrowding solution. It is a passenger counting system that will put a limit on passengers getting on a train when the train load exceeds its carrying capacity. Android based point of sale (POS) ticketing device is proposed to be used as a passenger counter and ticketing at the same time. It is expected that the current manual ticketing problems encountered by Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit can be solved by this device.