Dynamic Carriage Reserving for an Over-crowded Metro Junction Station

Abstract

At metro junction stations located in transportation hubs, a great number of passengers need to transfer to the metro system from other transportation modes during peak hours. This paper proposes a new train operation strategy—reserving carriages dynamically on each service train at the departure station for the metro junction station, which aims to relieve the serious passenger accumulation at the target station. We construct a nonlinear integer programming model which determines the number of reserved carriages on each train, and the total risk levels of passenger accumulation and passenger waiting time are both taken into account in the objective function. Furthermore, the latest arrival time of passengers on board is introduced to calculate effective passenger loading times analytically. At last, a set of numerical experiments from Beijing Metro Line 4 are implemented to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed approach.