A Study on the Estimation of Rail Passenger Queuing Time during Ticketing Service at Abuja (IDU) Railway Station, Nigeria.

Abstract

Queuing is an unavoidable condition faced in our day to day life. In a given organisation where service is being provided, a queue or waiting line is formed whenever an existing request of customers surpasses the present capability of servers to function. In this research, an estimation of passenger queuing time at the ticket window section of the Abuja (Idu) Railway station, Nigeria was carried out. The study design used in this research is the cross section descriptive observational study design, major data for the study was obtained by observation, using two digital stop watch to determine the number of servers, average arrival rate and average service rate of passengers with respect to the various train departure time without distracting employees of the railway station. Multi-server approach with its queuing mathematical model was embedded using MS excel spreadsheet to develop a queue excel template which was used to analyse and calculate the system performance measures (the average time a passenger is expected to spend in the ticketing section of the system). Results showed that a passenger is expected to spend an average of 5 minutes 26 seconds on Monday during the departure period of 06:30-07:00 am and 4 minutes 4 seconds in the ticketing section of the station during the 05:30-06:00 pm departure period. On a regular Saturday where the arrival rate is slightly greater than weekdays because more people usually travel to Kaduna, a passenger on that day is expected to spend an average of 6 minutes 5 seconds and 6 minutes 14 seconds in the system during the 6:30-07:00 am and 05:30-06:00 pm train departure time respectively. During festive periods where the arrival rate is far greater than the rate for regular days, a passenger is expected to spend an average of 7 minutes 9 seconds and 10 minutes 3 seconds in the system during the 06:30-07:00 am and 09:20-09:50 am train departure times respectively. From the analysis, increasing the number of workers (servers) result to a reduction in the average waiting time of passengers in queue and a decrease in the average waiting time of passenger in the queue decreases the total expected cost (cost of operating the service facilities) of the station. Therefore, by applying the Queuing model, the queuing time of the railway passengers was determined and improved upon.