Simulation and Control of Groups of People in Multi-modal Mobility

Tourism and transport are constantly growing and, with it, the movements of travellers. This entails two fundamental effects on which we must focus: control of mass tourism and the organization of transport. Good transport organization and travel planning avoid crowds and therefore mass tourism. This allows promoting sustainable tourism in which it is sought to offer a quality service to tourists taking care of the environment. In this thesis the objective is to manage the flow of groups of people through means of transport. This control of groups of people is aimed at customer satisfaction by offering quality tourism. On the one hand, the study focuses on the problem to mitigate the negative effects due to mass arrivals in touristic locations. A TEN network has been developed to define the optimal tours for different groups of tourists. A related mixed integer quadratic optimization model has been developed with three main objectives: it minimizes the maximum value of occupancy in the selected destinations to limit mass tourism, reduces the divergence between the proposed visit tour and one required by the tourist group and the overall duration of their visit, and a heuristic approach has been introduced. On the other hand, it has been implemented a railway scheduling and rescheduling problem introducing optimization-based and min-max approaches on the regional and high-speed railway network. The scheduling model defines the best schedules for a set of trains considering costumers’ demand and the priority of the trains to cover the rail sections in case of conflict on the railway lines. Consecutively, the generated feasible timetables are used to minimize possible consequences due to events that may negatively affect the real time traffic management. The main contribution of this section is the introduction in the second approach the innovative concept to prioritize the train that can access on the block section in case of conflicts on the network.