Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 6441: Passenger Flow Pushing Assignment Method for an Urban Rail Network Based on Hierarchical Path and Line Decomposition (Sustainability)

: For urban rail transit, an environmentally-friendly transportation mode, reasonable passenger flow assignment is the basis of train planning and passenger control, which is conducive to the sustainability of finance, operation and production. With the continuous expansion of the scale of urban rail networks, passenger travel path decision-making tends to be complex, which puts forward higher requirements of networked transportation organization. Based on undirected graphs and the idea of the recursive divide-and-conquer algorithm, this paper proposes a hierarchical effective path search method made up of a three-layer path generation strategy, which consists of deep search line paths, key station paths composed of origin–destination (O-D) nodes and transfer stations, and the station sequence path between the key stations. It can effectively simplify the path search and eliminate obvious unreasonable paths. Comparing the existing research results based on the classical polynomial Logit model, a practical Improved C-Logit multi-path passenger flow assignment model is proposed to calculate the selection ratio of each path in the set of effective paths. Combining the hierarchical path search strategy, the O-D pairs of passenger flow are divided into local-line and cross-line situations. The time-varying cross-line passenger flow is decomposed into a series of passenger sections along the key station paths. A passenger flow pushing assignment algorithm based on line decomposition is designed, which satisfies the dynamic, time-varying and continuous characteristics. The validation of Guangzhou Metro’s actual line network and time-varying O-D passenger demand in 2019 shows that the spatio-temporal distribution results of the passenger pushing assignment have a high degree of coincidence with the actual statistical data.