Optimization for Metro Operation Scheme of Suburban Lines: A New Method for Dealing with the Imbalanced Passenger Flow

The development of some central cities tends to be saturated, so some mega cities try to adopt the express and local mode of the metro. Suburban lines with imbalanced passenger flow between stations will lead to extremely crowded passenger flow in some stations, while scarce passenger flow in other stations. To balance the train's carrying capacity with the imbalanced passenger flow, this study explores the collaborative optimization of train operation under the new mode of express and local. First, a time-stamped data cropping strategy based on fine-grained time zones as the grid index is developed, which is used to deeply explore the OD spatiotemporal representation of passenger flow correlation mapping mechanism based on multisource data; then, the calculation model of the proportion of trains matching with the OD temporal and spatial characteristics of suburban passenger flow are constructed, and an efficient solution algorithm is developed to solve the problem of interest. Finally, a set of numerical experiments with operation data from Shanghai Metro Line 16 are conducted to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively realize the collaborative optimization of passenger OD prediction, train proportion, stop scheme, and travel time, so as to provide decision-making support and method guidance for the optimization of metro organizations in megacities.