Railways passengers comfort evaluation through motion parameters: a systematic review

Abstract

Railways are one of the most widely used mass transportation systems. Its superior transportation capacity, low environmental impact, high safety, and comfort have been leading to a continuous increase in passengers. To keep this trend going, it is crucial to improve the railways’ attractiveness and comfort levels. A rail journey’s comfort performance is rather complex, involving the analysis of multiple factors. Those raised by the vehicle motion and seat performance are the focus of vehicle designers’ concerns. Therefore, only a combination of static and dynamic comfort methodologies can accurately characterize passengers’ comfort. This work aimed to perform a systematic review concerning the comfort evaluation of train passengers. The bibliographic search yielded 62 studies on static and dynamic comfort evaluation methods. Results show a lack of experiments conducted on real rail environments, leading to weak conclusions regarding the real in-service conditions that train users face. Moreover, an investigation gap concerning the simultaneous application of both static and dynamic methodologies was observed. Therefore, more investigations are needed to evaluate and increase passengers’ comfort and promote rail usage as a daily transportation system.