Model of Passenger Flow Assignment for Urban Rail Transit Based on Entry and Exit Time Constraints

Abstract

The rail transit system in China has established network operations in many major cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing. With the automatic fare collection (AFC) system, a passenger can buy one ticket at the origin station and complete travel between two stations of different rail lines, an improvement in convenience for passengers. However, there may be many paths between the origin station and the destination station, and the path chosen by passengers cannot be determined simply. Thus, the problem of passenger flow assignment on the network arises. The AFC system can record the entry and exit times of passengers exactly, and the train operation plan can be obtained by train timetables. Because of the entry and exit times and the train operations, the range of feasible paths chosen by one passenger may be narrow. A passenger flow assignment model was devised, and an algorithm process was designed that calculates the chosen possibility of every feasible path and then matches the passengers to the most likely paths. Actual passenger data from the Beijing subway were used to verify the model and algorithm.