Estimation Method of Path-Selecting Proportion for Urban Rail Transit Based on AFC Data

With the successful application of automatic fare collection (AFC) system in urban rail transit (URT), the information of passengers’ travel time is recorded, which provides the possibility to analyze passengers’ path-selecting by AFC data. In this paper, the distribution characteristics of the components of travel time were analyzed, and an estimation method of path-selecting proportion was proposed. This method made use of single path ODs’ travel time data from AFC system to estimate the distribution parameters of the components of travel time, mainly including entry walking time (ewt), exit walking time (exwt), and transfer walking time (twt). Then, for multipath ODs, the distribution of each path’s travel time could be calculated under the condition of its components’ distributions known. After that, each path’s path-selecting proportion can be estimated. Finally, simulation experiments were designed to verify the estimation method, and the results show that the error rate is less than 2%. Compared with the traditional models of flow assignment, the estimation method can reduce the cost of artificial survey significantly and provide a new way to calculate the path-selecting proportion for URT.