Estimating Bus Passenger Flow OD Matrices Based On Bus IC Data

Only by understanding city residents’bus trip features deeply and acquiring accurate and comprehensive bus trip data timely, can we make scientific public transport planning and operation decisions and make sure urban public transport system operates efficiently. The universal application of bus IC card in many cities not only brings convenience to passengers, but also provides a new means of passenger flow statistical surveys. The advanced techniques, such as bus IC card and passengers automatic counting systems (APC), can help obtain relative real-time dynamic passenger flow information. Also they can provide important basis for the access to passenger trip OD.We consider the process and analysis methods of bus IC card data in this paper, and judge passengers’on-off stops based on the one-stop IC card data. We also put forward an improved structural model to estimate the OD matrix of the bus lines passenger flow. At the same time, we analyze the pre-existing methods, and solve a numerical example with different methods, analyze the sensitivity of the improved structural model’s attraction parameters, and prove the improved structural model’s superiority, analyze the stop attraction features and passengers’trip features of bus lines.The structure of bus IC card data is analyzed firstly. We also give a detailed analysis of the basic transit information such as passenger trip, bus lines and stops, bus operation and scheduling and so on. With the present IC data and technology conditions, we put forward a judging method of passengers’on-off stop. According to the judging of boarding stops, using clustering analysis, combined with the bus operation scheduling with time matching, we get the boarding passenger number of each stop. Above this, we present methods of judging the alighting stops based on single passenger IC data and stop attraction, respectively. At the same time, considering passengers’trip distance, land use properties nearby and stop attraction characteristic, we get the alighting passenger number of each stop based on stop attraction.Based on the passenger boarding numbers of each stop, we put forward an improved structural model to estimate the OD matrix of the bus lines passenger flow. Combined the passenger’s on-off numbers of each stop, methods such as the structural model, the probability theory model, Markov chain approach, iterative proportional fitting (IPF) method, Tsygalnitzky methods based on the theory of fluid dynamics and so on, are analyzed and compared. We analyze the sensitivity of the improved structural model’s attraction parameters. According to different models’ result, the improved structural model is superior because it can obtain the OD matrix of bus passenger flow without the information about the alighting passenger number, especial for the case of one-stop IC card data process.Finally, we take an example of the IC data of a single bus line at early peak periods of a day. After processing and analyzing the one-stop IC data, we get the passengers’ on-off numbers of each stop, and obtain the OD matrix between each stop with different methods. At last we get the features of stop attraction and passenger trip characteristic by analyzing the on-off passenger number at each stop, link flow and the bus path passenger distribution.