Optimizing Passenger Transfer Coordination in a Large Scale Rapid Rail Network

Urban rapid rail transit, or metro, is an essential travel mode for daily commuters in many metropolitan areas. Transfer stations, as hubs connecting various transit lines spatially, used to be the bottlenecks of the network due to its high volume of transfer passengers during peak periods. Coordinating train arrivals at the hubs by adjusting train departing times from the terminal may significantly reduce passenger transfer time. A mathematic model is developed and the optimal justification of train departure times which minimizes the total transfer time was found by a simulated annealing algorithm. A real-world metro network with five lines intersecting at thirteen stations is applied to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The passenger origin-destination demand of the study network was estimated based on data provided by an automatic fare collection system.

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