Related papers: Lonely passengers: a short proof
Empty buses are standing at a bus station. $n$ passengers arrive, and they each board a bus completely at random (meaning that they choose uniformly and independently). Then all buses depart. We show that the more buses there are, the more…
This paper introduces the \textbf{detachment process}, a novel, time-inhomogeneous Markov process inspired by I. P. T\'oth's problem \cite{Toth} concerning the number of ``lonely passengers'' (those without companions) when $n$ passengers…
The reader is reminded of several puzzles involving randomness. These may be ill-posed, and if well-posed there is sometimes a solution that uses probabilistic intuition in a special way. Various examples are presented including the well…
Passengers board a fully booked airplane in order. The first passenger picks one of the seats at random. Each subsequent passenger takes his or her assigned seat if available, otherwise takes one of the remaining seats at random. It is well…
Route choice models in public transport have been discussed for a long time. The main factor why a passenger chooses a specific path is usually based on its length or travel time. However, also the ticket price that passengers have to pay…
Suppose that $k$ runners having different constant speeds run laps on a circular track of unit length. The Lonely Runner Conjecture states that, sooner or later, any given runner will be at distance at least $1/k$ from all the other…
In a delightful article that recently appeared in the American Mathematics Monthly, Norbert Henze and Guenter Last discuss the "Absent-Minded Passengers" Problem, but left open finding an explicit expression for the probability generating…
We offer a formula for the probability distribution of the number of misseated airplane passengers resulting from the presence of multiple absent-minded passengers, given the number of seats available and the number of absent-minded…
The Lonely Runner Conjecture is a number theory problem, dating to 1964. Using dynamical systems theory, we show almost all sets of velocities solve the conjecture. Furthermore, any "traditional" approach of Diophantine approximation cannot…
We prove that the lonely runner conjecture holds for eight runners. Our proof relies on a computer verification and on recent results that allow bounding the size of a minimal counterexample. We note that our approach also applies to the…
Predicting future bus trip chains for an existing user is of great significance for operators of public transit systems. Existing methods always treat this task as a time-series prediction problem, but the 1-dimensional time series…
Loneliness does not only have emotional implications on a person but also on his/her well-being. The study of loneliness has been challenging and largely inconclusive in findings because of the several factors that might correlate to the…
We propose a new approach to the theory of conditioning for numerical analysis problems for which both classical and stochastic perturbation theory fail to predict the observed accuracy of computed solutions. To motivate our ideas, we…
We analyze a boarding solution for a transport system in which the number of passengers allowed to enter a transport cabin is automatically controlled. Expressions charac- terizing the stochastic properties of the passenger queue length,…
We consider a stylized formal model of public transportation, where a set of agents need to travel along a given road, and there is a bus that runs the length of this road. Each agent has a left terminal and a right terminal between which…
The Lonely Runner Conjecture asserts that if $n$ runners with distinct constant speeds run on the unit circle $\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}$ starting from $0$ at time $0$, then each runner will at some time $t>0$ be lonely in the sense that she/he…
Motivated by the applications of routing in PCB buses, the Rectangle Escape Problem was recently introduced and studied. In this problem, we are given a set of rectangles $\mathcal{S}$ in a rectangular region $R$, and we would like to…
Bus bunching is a curse of transportation systems such as buses in a loop. Here we present an analytical method to find the number of revolutions before two buses bunch in an idealised system, as a function of the initial distance and the…
In this paper, we consider a mobility system of travelers and providers, and propose a "mobility game" to study when a traveler is matched to a provider. Each traveler seeks to travel using the services of only one provider, who manages one…
We study a queueing system with Poisson arrivals on a bus line indexed by integers. The buses move at constant speed to the right and the time of service per customer getting on the bus is fixed. The customers arriving at station i wait for…