Fare Collection Data Research Articles

Transfer Penalty Estimation of Bus Passengers Considering Travel Frequency in Chengdu, China

The paper aims to examine bus passengers’ route choice behavior in the context of transfer penalty estimation. Methodologically, it leverages passengers’ stop-level trip information inferred from automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automated fare collection (AFC) data and compares the stop-level origin–destination (O-D) pairs with direct paths and transfer paths. The route choice models were established with the inclusion of normalized travel frequency as a key variable. A case study was performed using the trip data of adult card holders from the bus systems in Chengdu, China. The results show that the normalized travel frequency is a variable that makes an informative contribution to the explanation of passenger route choices. Specifically, passengers with higher travel frequency prefer to choose the transfer path. Moreover, the transfer penalty function in the context of the monthly travel frequency was obtained and shows that the travel frequency can reduce a passenger’s transfer penalty. Finally, the stabilities of the normalized travel frequency function and transfer penalty function were assessed using the trip data from the weekdays in four weeks with the results showing that the normalized travel frequency function is similar in shape. In addition, the relationship between a passenger’s monthly travel frequency and their familiarity with the bus network was discussed using the second derivative of the normalized travel frequency function.

Route choice estimation in rail transit systems using smart card data: handling vehicle schedule and walking time uncertainties

Several cities around the world rely on urban rail transit systems composed of interconnected lines, serving massive numbers of passengers on a daily basis. Accessing the location of passengers is essential to ensure the efficient and safe operation and planning of these systems. However, passenger route choices between origin and destination pairs are variable, depending on the subjective perception of travel and waiting times, required transfers, convenience factors, and on-site vehicle arrivals. This work proposes a robust methodology to estimate passenger route choices based only on automated fare collection data, i.e. without privacy-invasive sensors and monitoring devices. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not require precise train timetable information or prior route choice models, and is robust to unforeseen operational events like malfunctions and delays. Train arrival times are inferred from passenger volume spikes at the exit gates, and the likelihood of eligible routes per passenger estimated based on the alignment between vehicle location and the passenger timings of entrance and exit. Applying this approach to automated fare collection data in Lisbon, we find that while in most cases passengers preferred the route with the least transfers, there were a significant number of cases where the shorter distance was preferred. Our findings are valuable for decision support among rail operators in various aspects such as passenger traffic bottleneck resolution, train allocation and scheduling, and placement of services.

Effectiveness of trip planner data in predicting short-term bus ridership

Predictions on Public Transport (PT) ridership are beneficial as they allow for sufficient and cost-efficient deployment of vehicles. On an operational level, this relates to short-term predictions with lead times of less than an hour. Where conventional data sources on ridership, such as Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) data, may have longer lag times and contain no travel intentions, in contrast, trip planner data are often available in (near) real-time and are used before traveling. In this paper, we investigate how such data from a trip planner app can be utilized for short-term bus ridership predictions. This is combined with AFC data (in this case smart card data) to construct a ground truth on actual ridership. Using informative variables from the trip planner dataset through correlation analysis, we develop 3 supervised Machine Learning (ML) models, including k-nearest neighbors, random forest, and gradient boosting. The best-performing model relies on random forest regression with trip planner requests. Compared with the baseline model that depends on the weekly trend, it reduces the mean absolute error by approximately half. Moreover, using the same model with and without trip planner data, we prove the usefulness of trip planner data by an improved mean absolute error of 8.9% and 21.7% and an increased coefficient of determination from a 5-fold cross-validation of 7.8% and 18.5% for two case study lines, respectively. Lastly, we show that this model performance is maintained even for the trip planner requests with prediction lead times up to 30 min ahead, and for different periods of the day. We expect our methodology to be useful for PT operators to elevate their daily operations and level of service as well as for trip planner companies to facilitate passenger replanning, in particular during peak hours.

Short-Term Forecast of OD Passenger Flow Based on Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition

The development of metro systems can be a good solution to many problems in urban transport and promote sustainable urban development. A metro system plays an important role in urban public transit, and the passenger-flow forecasting is fundamental to assisting operators in establishing an intelligent transport system (ITS). In order to accurately predict the passenger flow of urban metros in different periods and provide a scientific basis for schedule planning, a short-term metro passenger-flow prediction model is constructed by integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) to solve the problem that the existing empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is prone to modal aliasing. According to the processed metro-card data, the time series of historical OD data of metro passenger flow is obtained. After EEMD modal decomposition, several intrinsic mode functions sub-items and residual items are obtained. Then, an LSTM network is constructed for prediction. The time step of the network is decided according to the partial autocorrelation functions. The prediction results of intrinsic mode function (IMF) and residual items are integrated to obtain prediction results. The station is classified according to the land types around the station, and the model is tested by using the metro automatic fare collection (AFC) data. In order to test the actual prediction, a different number of training set samples are selected to predict. The measured data of the next day is continuously added to the original training set to compare the prediction accuracy. The results show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE) of the EEMD-LSTM model are better than the EMD-LSTM in predicting the OD value of commercial–residential stations and scenic–residential stations. Compared with the EMD-LSTM model, the EEMD-LSTM model showed an average reduction by 3.112% in MAPE values and 15.889 in RMSE, indicating that the EEMD-LSTM has higher prediction accuracy, and EEMD-LSTM model has higher accuracy in short-term metro passenger-flow prediction. The average MAPE for the 35-to-42-day historical data sample decreased from 13.02% to 10.39% with a decreasing trend. It shows that the prediction accuracy keeps improving as the training set samples increase.

JP-DAP: An Intelligent Data Analytics Platform for Metro Rail Transport Systems

This paper deals with an intelligent data analytics platform - Jaison-Paul Data Analytics Platform (JP-DAP) - for metro rail transport systems. JP-DAP is intended to ensure smooth functioning, improved customer experience, ridership forecasting, and efficient administration of metro rail transportation systems by integrating and analysing its many data sources. It consists of a middleware which is built on the top of a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Spark framework, along with a set of open-source software tools like Apache Hive, Pandas, Google TensorFlow and Spark ML-lib for real-time and legacy data processing. The benchmarking of JP-DAP was conducted using TestDFSIO and have found that it performs well according to industry standards. The specific use case for this project is Kochi Metro Rail Limited (KMRL). The analysis of Automated Fare Collection data from KMRL on JP-DAP framework have produced descriptive statistics visualisation of inflow and outflow analysis, travel patterns during weekdays and weekends, origin-destination matrix, etc.. Moreover JP-DAP framework is capable of producing short term passenger flow predictions using SVR machine learning algorithm with linear, radial basis function and polynomial kernels. Our experiments have shown that SVR linear kernel gives the most accurate results with the least errors in predicting the next day’s passenger count using the previous five weekdays data. The station usage (one-to-all) prediction using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is also integrated to this framework. The visualisation as well as analytical outcomes of JP-DAP framework have also been made available to the external world using a rich set of REST APIs and are projected on to a web-dashboard.

Frequency-based path flow estimator for transit origin-destination trip matrices incorporating automatic passenger count and automatic fare collection data

A frequency-based path flow estimator is proposed to estimate the transit passenger origin–destination (OD) matrix in an urban congested transit network. The proposed model not only considers the effect of congestion under an equilibrium framework, but also benefits from being formulated as a single-level model with the route-section-based network representation. Multiple transit data sources are incorporated, including automatic passenger count, automatic fare collection and automatic vehicle location data. A path-based diagonalization approach embedded with an iterative balancing scheme is developed to solve the model. Case studies are conducted to demonstrate the features and applicability of the proposed model and algorithm.

Detection and analysis of transfer time in urban rail transit system using WIFI data

ABSTRACT This study presents a comprehensive framework for estimating passengers' transfer times and extracting their distribution and related transfer routes using WIFI probe data. The departure time of preceding station, arrival time of subsequent station, and train running time are selected to obtain transfer times. Then, the collected data is analyzed using kernel density estimation to obtain candidate distribution. Gaussian mixture models are adopted to extract the distribution of each possible transfer route at both peak hours and off-peak hours. This method is tested at two transfer stations of Xi’an metro system with the comparison of results from automatic fare collection data and manual sampling survey data. The results indicate that the proposed approach can collect the transfer time with a sampling ratio greater than 30% and a deviation less than 5%. The route choice behaviors and distribution of transfer time under various conditions can be identified using the proposed methods.

Research on temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of passenger flow of Daxing airport line based on automatic fare collection data

AbstractThe airport line plays an important role in the airport landside traffic connection, which greatly relieves the urban road pressure. Studying the characteristics and laws of the time and space distribution of the airport line passenger flow will provide basic support for the airport line's capacity configuration, passenger flow control, and air‐track coordinated operation, and will also provide quantitative basis for the layout of urban terminal buildings. This paper proposes a method to analyse the temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of airport line passenger flow based on AFC card swiping data. By mining and extracting the travel behaviour data of subway airport line air passengers, the distribution characteristics of airport line passenger flow are analysed and visualized from two aspects of passenger travel time and space. Finally, a case study is carried out based on the actual data of Daxing airport express. The results show that: (1) the travel time of departure and return passengers is concentrated in 60–90 min; (2) The departure and arrival points of passengers are concentrated within the Fourth Ring Road, and a large number of air passenger flows are gathered and evacuated at hubs such as Beijing South Railway Station and Beijing West Railway Station.

Analysis of the Relationship between Dockless Bicycle-Sharing and the Metro: Connection, Competition, and Complementation

Dockless bicycle-sharing (DLBS) is one of the novel transportation modes emerging in recent years. As a newly arisen mode, dockless bicycle-sharing inevitably has influence on the existing components of the public transportation system, especially the metro system. A large number of scholars have explored the integration relationship between the two. However, through the evaluation and quantification of the dockless bicycle-sharing data and the metro automatic fare collection data, we find that the relationship between the two is not unique. Based on the location of origin and destination, the travel duration, and the travel distance, the dockless bicycle-sharing trips closely related to the metro were identified and categorized into three different temporal-spatial relationships: competition trips, connection trips, and complementation trips. Three indicators were proposed to characterize the relationship between the two systems. A case study was carried out in Shanghai, China. The proposed method was applied to investigate when, where, and to what extent the dockless bicycle-sharing trips compete with, integrate with, and complement the metro. The results show that dockless bicycle-sharing mainly integrates with and complements the metro. It is where the dockless bicycle-sharing trip takes place and the trip significantly determines its relationship with the metro. The findings provide significant implications regarding the design and management of dockless bicycle-sharing and the metro.

Naïve Bayes-Based Transition Model for Short-Term Metro Passenger Flow Prediction under Planned Events

Short-term passenger flow prediction under planned events is important to reduce passenger delay and ensure operational safety in metro systems. However, most studies make predictions under normal conditions. The study proposes a naïve Bayes transition model for short-term passenger flow prediction under planned events. The target prediction scenario identification is modeled as a binary classification problem using naïve Bayes. The sub-models are developed using gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) and deep learning (DL) models for normal and planned event scenarios with predictor variables tailored to different passenger demand patterns. The sub-predictor from GBDT or DL is selected based on the inferred prediction scenario. The case study uses automatic fare collection (AFC) data of Shanghai and Hong Kong metro systems. The results show that the proposed model outperforms other representative individual and fusion models. The results also highlight the effectiveness of the predictive transition mechanism between the normal and planned events and also the event information representation.

Integrated optimization of train route plan and timetable with dynamic demand for the urban rail transit line

ABSTRACT In the urban rail transit system, train timetabling according to the dynamic passenger demand is important to offer high-quality service. Timetable optimization with the predetermined train route plan cannot synchronously consider the spatial and temporal characteristics of demand. Based on the Automated Fare Collection (AFC) data, this study proposes the integrated optimization (IO) to make route plan and timetable. A mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model is formulated with the aim of reducing passenger penalty travel time and operation penalty cost. An improved non-dominated sorted genetic algorithm-II (Improved NSGA-II) is applied to deal with the bi-objective problem. A numerical experiment is used to prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the model and the algorithm. Then, the IO approach is applied in a bi-directional urban rail transit line. The results show that the IO performs the best compared with two other feasible strategies, namely the current optimization (CO) and phased optimization (PO).

Short-Term Subway Inbound Passenger Flow Prediction Based on AFC Data and PSO-LSTM Optimized Model

Making accurate predictions of subway passenger flow is conducive to optimizing operation plans. This study aims to analyze the regularity of subway passenger flow and combine the modeling skills of deep learning with transportation knowledge to predict the short-term subway passenger flow in the scenarios of workdays and holidays. The processed data were collected from two months of Automated Fare Collection (AFC) data from Xizhimen station of Beijing metro. The data were first cleaned by the established cleansing rules to delete malformed and abnormal logic data. The cleaned data were used to analyze the spatial characteristics in passenger flow. Second, a short-term subway passenger flow prediction model was built on the basis of long short-term memory (LSTM). Determining that the error will be relatively high in peak hours, we proposed gradual optimizations from data input by dividing one whole day into different time periods, and then used particle swarm optimization (PSO) to search for the optimal hyperparameters setting. Finally, inbound passenger flow of Beijing Xizhimen subway station in 2018 was selected for numerical experiments. Predictions of the LSTM-based model had higher accuracy than the traditional machine learning support vector regression (SVR) model, with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 21.97% and 4.80% in the scenarios of workdays and holidays, respectively, which are both lower than those of the SVR model. The optimized PSO-LSTM model has been verified for its effectiveness and accurateness by the AFC data.

Data‐Driven Method for Passenger Path Choice Inference in Congested Subway Network

In a congested large‐scale subway network, the distribution of passenger flow in space‐time dimension is very complex. Accurate estimation of passenger path choice is very important to understand the passenger flow distribution and even improve the operation service level. The availability of automated fare collection (AFC) data, timetable, and network topology data opens up a new opportunity to study this topic based on multisource data. A probability model is proposed in this study to calculate the individual passenger’s path choice with multisource data, in which the impact of the network time‐varying state (e.g., path travel time) on passenger path choice is fully considered. First, according to the number and characteristics of OD (origin‐destination) candidate paths, the AFC data among special kinds of OD are selected to estimate the distribution of passengers’ walking time and waiting time of each platform. Then, based on the composition of path travel time, its real‐time probability distribution is formulated with the distribution of walking time, waiting time, and in‐vehicle time as parameters. Finally, a membership function is introduced to evaluate the dependence between passenger’s travel time and the real‐time travel time distribution of each candidate path and take the path with the largest membership degree as passenger’s choice. Finally, a case study with Beijing Subway data is applied to verify the effectiveness of the model presented in this study. We have compared and analysed the path calculation results in which the time‐varying characteristics of network state are considered or not. The results indicate that a passenger’s path choice behavior is affected by the network time‐varying state, and our model can quantify the time‐varying state and its impact on passenger path choice.

Measuring the Similarity of Metro Stations Based on the Passenger Visit Distribution

The distribution of passengers reflects the characteristics of urban rail stations. The automatic fare collection system of rail transit collects a large amount of passenger trajectory data tracking the entry and exit continuously, which provides a basis for detailed passenger distributions. We first exploit the Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) data to construct the passenger visit pattern distribution for stations. Then we measure the similarity of all stations using Wasserstein distance. Different from other similarity metrics, Wasserstein distance takes the similarity between values of quantitative variables in the one-dimensional distribution into consideration and can reflect the correlation between different dimensions of high-dimensional data. Even though the computational complexity grows, it is applicable in the metro stations since the scale of urban rail transit stations is limited to tens to hundreds and detailed modeling of the stations can be performed offline. Therefore, this paper proposes an integrated method that can cluster multi-dimensional joint distribution considering similarity and correlation. Then this method is applied to cluster the rail transit stations by the passenger visit distribution, which provides some valuable insight into the flow management and the station replanning of urban rail transit in the future.

Cascading Failure Analysis on Shanghai Metro Networks: An Improved Coupled Map Lattices Model Based on Graph Attention Networks.

Analysis of the robustness and vulnerability of metro networks has great implications for public transport planning and emergency management, particularly considering passengers’ dynamic behaviors. This paper presents an improved coupled map lattices (CMLs) model based on graph attention networks (GAT) to study the cascading failure process of metro networks. The proposed model is applied to the Shanghai metro network using the automated fare collection (AFC) data, and the passengers’ dynamic behaviors are simulated by GAT. The quantitative cascading failure analysis shows that Shanghai metro network is robust to random attacks, but fragile to intentional attacks. Moreover, there is an approximately normal distribution between instant cascading failure speed and time step and the perturbation in a station which leads to steady state is approximately a constant. The result shows that a station surrounded by other densely distributed stations can trigger cascading failure faster and the cascading failure triggered by low-level accidents will spread in a short time and disappear quickly. This study provides an effective reference for dynamic safety evaluation and emergency management in metro networks.

Urban Railway Transit Timetable Optimisation Based on Passenger-and-Trains Matching – A Case Study of Beijing Metro Line

Due to the congested scenarios of the urban railway system during peak hours, passengers are often left behind on the platform. This paper firstly brings a proposal to capture passengers matching different trains. Secondly, to reduce passengers’ total waiting time, timetable optimisation is put forward based on passengers matching different trains. This is a two-stage model. In the first stage, the aim is to obtain a match between passengers and different trains from the Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) data as well as timetable parameters. In the second stage, the objective is to reduce passengers’ total waiting time, whereby the decision variables are headway and dwelling time. Due to the complexity of our proposed model, an MCMC-GASA (Markov Chain Monte Carlo-Genetic Algorithm Simulated Annealing) hybrid method is designed to solve it. A real-world case of Line 1 in Beijing metro is employed to verify the proposed two-stage model and algorithms. The results show that several improvements have been brought by the newly designed timetable. The number of unique matching passengers increased by 37.7%, and passengers’ total waiting time decreased by 15.5%.

Forecasting Passenger Flow Distribution on Holidays for Urban Rail Transit Based on Destination Choice Behavior Analysis

Passenger travel flows of urban rail transit during holidays usually show distinct characteristics different from normal days. To ensure efficient operation management, it is essential to accurately predict the distribution of holiday passenger flow. Based on Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) data, this paper explores the passengers’ destination choice differences between normal days and holidays, as well as one-way tickets and public transportation cards, which provides support for variable selection in modeling. Then, a forecasting model of holiday travel distribution is proposed, in which the destination choice model is established for representing local and nonlocal passengers. Meanwhile, explanatory variables such as land matching degree, scenic spot dummy, and level of service variables are introduced to deal with the particularity of holiday passengers’ travel behavior. The parameters calibrated by the improved weighted exogenous sampling maximum likelihood (WESML) method are applied to predict passenger flow distribution in different holiday cases with annual changes in the metro network, using the data collected from Guangzhou Metro, China. The results show that the proposed model is valid and performs better than the other comparable models in terms of forecasting accuracy. The proposed model has the capability to provide a more universal and accurate passenger flow distribution prediction method for urban rail transit in different holiday scenarios with network changes.

Recovering the Association Between Unlinked Fare Machines and Stations Using Automated Fare Collection Data in Metro Systems

Data quality is the foundation of data-driven applications in transportation. Data problems such as missing and invalid data could sharply reduce the performance of the methods used in these applications. Although there exist plenty of studies related to data quality issues, they only focus on missing or invalid data caused by infrastructure failures (e.g., loop detector malfunction). In general, there is a lack of attention to data quality issues from insufficient data management. This paper proposes a tensor decomposition based framework to tackle a specific missing data problem which occurs when the machine-station dictionary of an automated fare collection system database is incomplete. In such cases, there is a large amount of loss of origin/destination information as the affected machines are not linked to any station. Consequently, all associated transactions may miss the origin/destination information. The proposed framework recovers the dictionary by capturing features of the passenger flow passing through the unlinked fare machine. Evaluation results show that the proposed approach could recover the missing data with high accuracy even when several fare machines are not linked to a station. The framework could also support other beneficial applications.

Unplanned Disruption Analysis in Urban Railway Systems Using Smart Card Data

Metro system disruptions are a big concern due to their impacts on safety, service quality, and operating efficiency. A better understanding of system performance and passenger behavior under unplanned disruptions is critical for efficient decision making, effective customer communication, and identifying potential improvements. However, few studies explore disruption impacts on individual passenger behavior, and most studies use manually collected survey data. This study examines the potential of using automated collection data to comprehensively analyze unplanned disruption impacts. We propose a systematic approach to evaluate disruption impacts on system performance and individual responses in urban railway systems using automated fare collection (AFC) data. We develop a set of performance metrics to evaluate performance from the perspectives of train operations, information provision (communication), and bridging strategy (shuttle bus services to connect stations impacted by a disruption). We also propose an inference method to quantify the individual response to disruptions (e.g. travel or not, change stations or modes) depending on their trip characteristics with respect to the location and timing of the disruption. The proposed approach is demonstrated using data from a busy metro system. The results highlight the ability of AFC data in providing new insights for the analysis of unplanned disruptions, which are difficult to extract from traditional data collection methods. The case study shows that the disruption impacts are network-wide, and the impacts on passengers continue for a significant amount of time after the incident ended. The behavior highlights the importance of real-time information and the need for timely dissemination.

Data-Driven Approach for Passenger Mobility Pattern Recognition Using Spatiotemporal Embedding

Urban mobility pattern recognition has great potential in revealing human travel mechanism, discovering passenger travel purpose, and predicting and managing traffic demand. This paper aims to propose a data-driven method to identify metro passenger mobility patterns based on Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) data and geo-based data. First, Point of Information (POI) data within 500 meters of the metro stations are captured to characterize the spatial attributes of the stations. Especially, a fusion method of multisource geo-based data is proposed to convert raw POI data into weighted POI data considering service capabilities. Second, an unsupervised learning framework based on stacked auto-encoder (SAE) is designed to embed the spatiotemporal information of trips into low-dimensional dense trip vectors. In detail, the embedded spatiotemporal information includes spatial features (POI categories around the origin station and that around the destination station) and temporal features (start time, day of the week, and travel time). Third, a density-based clustering algorithm is introduced to identify passenger mobility patterns based on the embedded dense trip vectors. Finally, a case of Beijing metro network is used to verify the feasibility of the above methodology. The results show that the proposed method performs well in recognizing mobility patterns and outperforms the existing methods.