Making trains run on time
economist.com
economist.com
Why not look at the amusement park industry- they have bypassed these by having strict controls on ingress/egress for the ride - you get on one side and exit the other. Also they have guardrails or sliding doors preventing any suicides or dangerous behavior from interfering with the ride (trains in HK/Shenzhen had that years ago).
I fail to see why AI or a panopticon is needed to solve these problems.
That said: Improvements are always welcome ;-)
On the platforms, there are indications where the doors will be when the train stops. The trains always stop in exactly the same place. Waiting passengers line up on the platform just in front of where the doors will be. They often paint a box on the pavement to show where to line up and people stand in those boxes -- moving down the platform to an box that isn't too full.
When the train stops, waiting passengers move to either side of the door. They wait until all passengers have exited the train before trying to board the train themselves. Japan is a rule following culture. You can't grow up here without having that drilled into your head. People then find it common sense to wait for their turn rather than trying to get on the train early.
People on the train line up in front of the doors. People who are not getting off the train move into the centre of the cars. Again: rule following culture, common sense, etc.
Finally, Japan is not particularly litigious. If you try to get on/off the train when the doors are closing, it doesn't stop closing for you. It closes hard. I swear they even open it a bit and then slam it shut on you again on purpose. It hurts. Basically, it's your penalty for being a dumb ass ;-) You literally can not hold the door open. It will keep crashing shut on you until you get out of the way.
The last point I can think about at the moment is that they keep track of statistics and set the schedules based on data, not hope. I was at the train station the other day and noticed that one of the train's schedule ran 1 minute later during rush hour than when it was not so busy. This is to accommodate the passengers getting on and off, presumably. That's the precision of their schedules -- 1 minute makes a difference to them. In the UK, the train isn't even officially late unless it is more than 10 minutes late and I think that's 90% of their problem.
This requires every station to have platforms on both sides of each track, but that's fairly often the case anyway.
This is almost never the case in the UK.
Sometimes, people have reasons for picking a particular door. They may be able to see inside and tell that there's fewer people in that part of the carriage, or they might intend to disembark at a station where that door's placement will confer an advantage: this is especially common in grade-separated rapid transit systems, where the placement of paths towards exits varies from station to station.
But at other times, people will try to board wherever they are able. This is likely the case if they try to board after the 'scheduled departure', which is the situation the article points to as a source of delays. And herein lies the problem: presumably, the passengers' concern about catching the train at all outweighs their desire to pick the best door. This solution is least likely to solve the situations that cause the most disruption, and is most likely to improve boarding at times when passengers have time and ability to make a discretionary choice anyway.
A low-tech strategy to try is to designate one door per carriage as an exit door, and the rest as entry doors. At a station, open the exit door first, and the volume of exiting people will curtail attempts to embark. Then after a few-second delay, open the rest of the doors and allow people to enter. This is made more effective with physical separation between embarkation doors and exit doors, such that the two streams of people don't interfere. Some newer airport people mover stations have two tracks and 3 platforms: trains discharge passengers to the outer platforms, while people wait on the center platform until the entry doors open a few seconds later. This setup is also common in amusement parks.
I've switched to the tram train route that's just opened in Sheffield and that is seeing the same problems. Northern trains running late causing a backlog.
I really miss Japan's rail system.
People stack up on each side of the doors and let passengers off through the middle before boarding https://i.pinimg.com/474x/19/91/b9/1991b9aa93463b7fa254e1d59...
Some stations have multiple routes to the platform to improve spread https://i.pinimg.com/474x/d0/75/91/d075917d0c293cf183461e99b...