Urban Passenger Transport Hub Research Articles

Model for Intercity Railway Schedule Optimization Incorporating Metrorail Transfers

The promotion of multimodal coordination is of great significance for the joint development of diverse urban transportation systems. Focusing on a comprehensive urban passenger transport hub that converges both intercity modes and multiple inner-city modes, our study aims to incorporate intercity railway and Metrorail coordination into train scheduling optimization to enhance transfer efficiency and provide a seamless service for passengers in urban railway networks. By considering the variety of passenger demands in different transport modes (e.g., rail transit and traditional mainline railway), train loading capacity, and potential disruption scenarios, we specifically developed a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to simultaneously generate the coordination strategies, arrival/departure times of trains at each station, and the number of carriages in service in the network. To enhance computational efficiency, we proposed several improvement strategies involving the model linearization to reformulate the MINLP model into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and the determination of appropriate big- M values. Finally, numerical experiments based on historical passenger data from a realistic urban railway network in China were implemented to verify the effectiveness of our approach. The results demonstrate that our intercity railway and Metrorail coordination strategies could, in practice, significantly improve passenger transfer efficiency by over 35% compared with the train schedule without coordination.

Connectivity Contribution to Urban Hub Network Based on Super Network Theory – Case Study of Beijing

With the rapid development of urbanization in China, the number of travel modes and urban passenger transportation hubs has been increasing, gradually forming multi-level and multi-attribute transport hub networks in the cities. At the same time, Super Network Theory (SNT) has advantages in displaying the multi-layer transport hubs. The aim of this paper is to provide a new perspective to study connectivity contribution of potential hubs. Urban transport hubs are ranked through topological features based on Hub Super Network (HSN). This paper proposes two indexes based on Super-Edge (SE), Zero Hub Degree of SE (ZHDoSE) and a number of shared SEes (NSSE), respectively. Then, a case study was conducted in Beijing, which considers four combinations to study the influence of transport modes and subway lines on connectivity. The results show that no-normalization strengthens the contribution of transport modes and subway lines on connectivity. Besides, the transport mode contributes a lot to the connectivity. However, elements normalization strengthens the subway lines under ZHDoSE reciprocal. In addition, various weights of ZHDoSE and NSSE have different influences on the recognition results of SEes in HSN.

ACP-Based Management and Control for Urban Passenger Transportation Hubs

ACP-Based Management and Control for Urban Passenger Transportation Hubs

ACP-based Management and Control System for Urban Passenger Transportation Hubs

Accurate assessment and effective control of urban passenger transportation hub operations are an area that traditional methods have yet to address satisfactorily. This article presents a framework for parallel management and control based on the artificial societies, computational experiments, and parallel execution (ACP) paradigm. The authors first introduce the components, internal interactions, and support mechanism of artificial transportation hubs. They then describe an agent-based model for the hub including the computational experiments and responsibilities of parallel execution in active hub management and control. Thy also present an implementation of the framework through field tests. The framework can improve operational efficiency and service quality of urban passenger transportation hubs.