Passenger Train Timetable Optimization Based On Passenger Flow Demand

Railway plays a important role in national transportation.Compared with other transportation modes,railway have the advantages of high speed,low cost,and safety.Nowadays,more passengers choose railway transportation mode.With the rapid development of our country's economy,people's quality of life has greatly increased and the number of passengers has increased significantly,while passengers put forward higher requirements for the quality of rail transportation services.This makes the railway operation management department need to improve the service quality and optimize the passenger train timetable so as to satisfy the fast,safe,and convenient travel needs of passengers.The passenger train timetable which is based on passenger flow demand can effectively balance the capacity supply of railway transportation and passenger flow demand.When passenger flow demand is high,a high Starting frequency is used to minimize waiting time for passengers.When there is less passenger flow demand,use lower frequencies to increase attendance of passenger trains;this can satisfy the needs of passengers,but also to satisfy the economic significance of operations management.The waiting time refers not only to the waiting time of the passengers at the station,but also to the waiting time of some passengers who have to choose the next train due to the limited capacity of the trains during the high Passenger flow demand period.Based on the data analysis of the station's manual ticketing,the data of the online ticket sales and the questionnaire survey,the passenger flow characteristics and its influencing factors were analyzed.Three relative railway timetable optimization models,which are based on passenger flow demands are established and the method for solving the models is presented.Finally,the real case of the Dali Railway from Lijiang to Dali is studied to verify effective of the model and solution method.The main contributions of this study are listed as follows:(1)Study the distributed characteristics of train passenger flows and its influencing factors,and analyze influence for the departure interval of the passenger train and the departure time of the first train to the total passenger waiting time.(2)Based on the passenger flow demand and the distributed characteristics of passenger flow changes in time and space,three relative railway timetable optimization models were constructed to minimize the total passenger waiting time.Model 1:In the railway line,the origin station of the train departure is the same,and the destination station of the train arrival is also the same;Model 2:The starting station of the train departure is the same,and the final station of the train arrival can be the same or different and is not limited;Model 3:The starting station of the train departure and the final station of the train arrival can both be the same or different and are not restricted.(3)Before using MATLAB to code a program to call CPLEX solving the large scale mixed-integer linear programming model,we first simplified the problem:designing a small example of the passenger train timetable optimization problem and solving it.The purpose of this process is to verify the validity of the model and ensure that the optimization of the timetable for railway passenger trains can have an good effect.(4)The proposed model and solution method are applied to the case of the Dali Railway.The program is written using MATLAB and the subroutine of CPLEX is called to solve the optimization model conveniently and quickly.Verification of the effectiveness of the established model and solution method with actual cases is provided at last.