The Subway Passenger Flow Macroscopic State Analysis

Recently, the ridership explosion brings great challenges to the service of subway companies such as crowdedness in trains and the insufficient capacity of subway facilities. Thus, understanding, describing, and controlling the subway passenger flow state is necessary to mitigate estimated or forecasted traffic congestion. In this context, we incorporated the passenger volume of the station which includes inbound, outbound and transfer process and a load of section into the exploration of system element states. Thus, the network can be examined in the context of operation, which is the ultimate purpose of the existence of a subway network. Utilization rate and load factor were proposed to describe the state of station and section. Based on the basic states of elements, system passenger flow macroscopic states which can describe the subway system operation condition from a global perspective are presented with the entropy. Finally, Beijing subway system is implemented to validate the accuracy and superiority of this method.