Metro passengers' route choice model and its application considering perceived transfer threshold.

Fanglei Jin,Yongsheng Zhang,Shasha Liu,Enjian Yao,Xiaolei Ma

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0185349

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Metro network in China, the greatly increased route alternatives make passengers’ route choice behavior and passenger flow assignment more complicated, which presents challenges to the operation management. In this paper, a path sized logit model is adopted to analyze passengers’ route choice preferences considering such parameters as in-vehicle time, number of transfers, and transfer time. Moreover, the “perceived transfer threshold” is defined and included in the utility function to reflect the penalty difference caused by transfer time on passengers’ perceived utility under various numbers of transfers. Next, based on the revealed preference data collected in the Guangzhou Metro, the proposed model is calibrated. The appropriate perceived transfer threshold value and the route choice preferences are analyzed. Finally, the model is applied to a personalized route planning case to demonstrate the engineering practicability of route choice behavior analysis. The results show that the introduction of the perceived transfer threshold is helpful to improve the model’s explanatory abilities. In addition, personalized route planning based on route choice preferences can meet passengers’ diversified travel demands.

Highlights

The Metro is widely regarded as an energy-efficient transport mode to undertake the task of enormous resident trips in densely populated urban areas, which is capable of improving the urban traffic effectively
This paper deeply investigates the passengers’ route choice behavior in the Metro system based on discrete choice theory and takes personalized route planning as an application case to show the practical engineering value of route choice behavior analysis, which is demonstrated to be capable of providing more reasonable planning results in different circumstances considering the route choice preferences
A route choice model is proposed in this paper, in which the utility function consists of level of service variables, socio-demographics, network knowledge, the path size factor denoting the penalty of route overlapping degree on the utility, and the logical judgment measuring the penalty effect on transfer time under different numbers of transfers

Summary

Introduction

The Metro is widely regarded as an energy-efficient transport mode to undertake the task of enormous resident trips in densely populated urban areas, which is capable of improving the urban traffic effectively. Metro route choice model considering perceived transfer threshold process of passengers is important for daily operation management. The research results reveal the mechanism of route choice and give crucial information concerning operation and management Among these data, in-vehicle time, transfer time and number of transfers are widely imported, including De et al, Zhang et al and Eluru et al [4,5,6]. Hochmair [7,8] and Reveau et al [9] emphasized the factors related to topology indicating the deviation between origins and destinations and made comparisons between the effects on route choice conducted by different types of schematic maps. Tirachini et al, and Pursula et al [10,11,12] studied the factors related to the perception of comfort, including load density and seat occupancy, showing that passengers would like to pursue room and seats to feel comfortable during trips

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