Optimal congestion control strategies for near-capacity urban metros: Informing intervention via fundamental diagrams

摘要: Congestion; operational delays due to a vicious circle of passenger congestion and train-queuing; is an escalating problem for metro systems because it has negative consequences from passenger discomfort to eventual mode shifts. Congestion arises due to large volumes of passenger boardings and alightings at bottleneck stations, which may lead to increased stopping times at stations and consequent queuing of trains upstream. Such queuing further reduces line throughput and implies an even greater accumulation of passengers at stations. Alleviating congestion requires control strategies such as regulating the inflow of passengers entering bottleneck stations. The availability of large-scale smartcard and train movement data from day-to-day operations facilitates the development of models that can inform such strategies in a data-driven way. In this paper, we propose to model station-level passenger …