Optimizing urban rail timetable under time-dependent demand and oversaturated conditions

Authors

Huimin Niu
Xuesong Zhou

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2013

Subject Area

operations - crowding, operations - capacity, technology - ticketing systems, place - asia

Keywords

Urban rail line, Train timetable, Time-dependent demand, Oversaturated condition, Transit service optimization, Genetic algorithm

Abstract

This article focuses on optimizing a passenger train timetable in a heavily congested urban rail corridor. When peak-hour demand temporally exceeds the maximum loading capacity of a train, passengers may not be able to board the next arrival train, and they may be forced to wait in queues for the following trains. A binary integer programming model incorporated with passenger loading and departure events is constructed to provide a theoretic description for the problem under consideration. Based on time-dependent, origin-to-destination trip records from an automatic fare collection system, a nonlinear optimization model is developed to solve the problem on practically sized corridors, subject to the available train-unit fleet. The latest arrival time of boarded passengers is introduced to analytically calculate effective passenger loading time periods and the resulting time-dependent waiting times under dynamic demand conditions. A by-product of the model is the passenger assignment with strict capacity constraints under oversaturated conditions. Using cumulative input–output diagrams, we present a local improvement algorithm to find optimal timetables for individual station cases. A genetic algorithm is developed to solve the multi-station problem through a special binary coding method that indicates a train departure or cancellation at every possible time point. The effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm are evaluated using a real-world data set.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part C Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

Recommended Citation

Niu, H., & Zhou, X. (2013). Optimizing urban rail timetable under time-dependent demand and oversaturated conditions. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Volume 36, November 2013, Pages 212–230.