Modelling And Analysis Of Delay Propagation And Transfer Connection Control Of Urban Railway Network

Ever since recent decades, our national economy has been developing at a high speed, and the number of citizen dwells saw a sharp rise. Those changes threw out a challenge to the city traffic management as a huge increase arises in the amount of city traffic. Many passengers regard urban railway traffic as their best travel mode, that is because the railway traffic travels fast and can bring them to their destinations on time, and railways can carry a lot of them. There have been nineteen cities in Chinese Mainland which have built and run urban railway networks by March,2014. Between those cities, metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, possess an intricate urban railway network and effectively operate their network systems. The high-speed development of railway and railway network, on one hand provide more wide service areas to the passengers and play a more and more important role in the city function, which in turns attract more passenger flows. On the other hand, more passengers inevitably cause the problem of congestion to this traffic mode. However, passengers nowadays are starting to ask for a more comfortable travel environment and higher service level. They would like to make an immediate transfer after they get off the trains, which call for the railway network operators to manage the transfer connections more efficiently. A good transfer connection control policy can make passengers wait less time in their travels, and contain a relative stable status of the railway network after delays emerge.There are many studies about transfer optimization concerned with the scheduling process or timetable analysis. However, most of the models aimed to minimize the waiting time; the effect of passenger flow is largely overlooked when analyzing the railway transfer management. Over-crowding in peak hour in an intricate network such as Beijing railway is quite common, meanwhile the railway network always faces large scale passenger flows in holidays such as Spring Festival and the National Day.To fill this gap, this paper proposes a transfer synchronization control model with adequate consideration of passenger flow. With the max-plus system theory, the model can be represented by a discrete event dynamic one. Besides, congestion effects and subway independencies resulting from the timetables and logistic are considered to make it more applicable in reality operation. The significance of this model, compared with the existing ones, is that it shows how the synchronization control time margins change with the different passenger flows. With the aim of minimizing the overall waiting time of all passengers involved, including the transferring passengers, through passengers, and originating passengers, as well as passengers on subsequent stations. The proposed model can effectively calculate synchronization control time and decide whether to secure or cancel a transfer.A simple network, part of Beijing railway network both in peak and off-peak periods, is used to verify the model. The max-plus delay propagation model and computations of the waiting cost are calculated with the Matlab7.1software. Compared with the existing ones, This TSCM is based on the Beijing subway network, which has its own endemic characteristics different from URNs of other countries. The calculation result in Section5shows the positive significance of the congestion formulation. Other significance of this model is that it shows how the synchronization control time margins change with different passenger flows.