Managing Recurrent Congestion of Subway Network in Peak Hours with Station Inflow Control

Station inflow control (SIC) is an important and effective method for reducing recurrent congestion during peak hours in the Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou subway systems. This work proposes a practical and efficient method for establishing a static SIC scheme in normal weekdays for large-scale subway networks. First, a traffic assignment model without capacity constraint is utilized to determine passenger flow distributions on the network. An internal relationship between station inflows and section flows is then constructed. Second, capacity bottlenecks are identified by considering the transport capacity of each section. Then, a feedback-based bottleneck elimination strategy is established to search target control stations and determine their control time and control strength. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a decision support system coded in the C# programming language was developed, and the Beijing subway was used as a case study. The results indicate that the proposed method and tool are capable of practical applications, and the generated SIC plan has better performance over the existing SIC plan. This study provides a practical and useful method for operation agencies to construct SIC schemes in the subway system.