Passenger inflow control with hierarchical coordination for overloaded metro lines

Abstract

Due to the congestion in urban rail transit during peak hours, this study proposes a hierarchical coordinated passenger inflow control model for overloaded metro lines from three dimensions, namely line, station and ticket gate. The hierarchical structure divides the system into three control layers and the model is established using the linear programming method. An improved particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm, combining the interior penalty function and the basic PSO algorithm, is used to find the optimal objective value. In addition, the objective function with the penalty function to transform the constrained optimisation problem into an unconstrained optimisation problem is developed to solve the model. Finally, a real-world instance with operation data of the Beijing Metro Line 5 is implemented to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed approaches.