Identifying Station-Link Correlation for Target Passenger Flow Control in Subway Network

Subway systems of most metropolitan cities worldwide are suffering from the problem of overloaded passenger flow especially during rush-hour of weekday. To address it, passenger flow control strategy is widely adopted by developing subway system in order to improve the operational efficiency and ensure passengers' safety. However, current strategy is usually formulated by the subjective experience of operation staff at each station. Their inability to grasp the correlation between station flow and link flow in the entire subway network can possibly cause reverse effect and passengers' dissatisfaction. In this paper, a new coordinated-based passenger flow control method, using the internal relation of stations and links, is proposed to handle this issue during rush-hour of regular weekday with the aim of minimizing the negative impact on irrelevant travelers. Using this approach, one can determine the target control stations with specific control strength in different period of rush-hour. An experiment is conducted on a real-world subway network in Guangzhou to examine the validity of the method. Result shows that our strategy is more advanced and effective compared to the actual one.