Abstract
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, public transport systems suffered a significant reduction in passengers due to the suppression of services and reduced vehicle capacity. This reduction jeopardized their role as facilitators of sustainable mobility, causing large economic losses to public transport operators. Therefore, an intelligent management aimed at reducing the risk of contagion among its users is an aspect of interest for public transport operators and a challenge from a scientific point of view. This paper presents the results of a study aimed at analyzing the effect of different seat allocation strategies on the risk of contagion among passengers. Starting from a formalization of the problem based on epidemiological and public transport entities, the methodology employed, based on Data Mining, makes use of simulation processes to analyze the effect of these strategies. The paper presents the results obtained by analyzing a route of a public road passenger transport operator. The results allow us to evaluate the risk of contagion of different seat allocation strategies and to evaluate how this risk varies according to the number of passengers who have traveled on a vehicle journey.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their gratitude to Salcai Utinsa S.A. (GLOBAL), one of the main road transport company that operates in Gran Canaria, for their collaboration in providing all the data used to develop this research work.
Funding
This research was supported by the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) through Project COVID19-03.
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Cristóbal, T., Quesada-Arencibia, A., de Blasio, G.S., Padrón, G., Alayón, F., García, C.R. (2023). Study of Different Seat Allocation Strategies to Reduce the Risk of Contagion Among Passengers in a Public Road Transport System. In: Bravo, J., Ochoa, S., Favela, J. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2022). UCAmI 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 594. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21333-5_21
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