Urban rail transit scheduling under time-varying passenger demand

Abstract

In view of the conflict between the time-variation of urban rail transit passenger demand and the homogeneity of the train timetable, this paper takes into account the interests of both passengers and operators to build an urban rail transit scheduling model to acquire an optimized time-dependent train timetable. Based on the dynamic passenger volumes of origin-destination pairs from the automatic fare collection system, the model focuses on minimizing the total passenger waiting time with constraints on time interval between two consecutive trains, number and capacity of trains available, and load factor of trains. A hybrid algorithm which consists of the main algorithm based on genetic algorithm and the nested algorithm based on train traction calculation and safety distance requirement is designed to solve the model. To justify the effectiveness and the practical value of the proposed model and algorithm, a case of Nanjing Metro Line S1 is illustrated in this paper. The result shows that the optimized train timetable has advantage compared to the original one.