Online estimation model for passenger flow state in urban rail transit using multi‐source data

Abstract The estimation of present passenger flow state plays a vital role in the urban rail transit (URT) operation process and it is the basis of passenger flow control and train dispatching. Most of the existing researches used the Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) System data as the single data source for estimating present passenger flow state. In consideration of the delay in the data uploading process, the obtained estimation results based on the single AFC data source are not accurate enough, which could lead to the improper handling and decision failure and cause high risk and low efficiency for the operation and management of URT. To address problems mentioned above, this paper adopted the automatic differentiation method as the framework for the fusion of multi‐source heterogeneous data (including uploaded AFC data, the mobile phone signaling data provided by mobile phones, and the historical passenger flow data, etc.). Then, this paper proposed the online estimation model and the error layered optimization algorithm to implement the estimation of present passenger flow state. The calculation results indicate that the proposed model and algorithm can obtain reasonable and reliable URT passenger flow state. Finally, the study developed a present passenger flow state estimation system using the proposed model and algorithm. The system has been deployed in Chengdu Metro that serves about 3 million passengers per day from October 2018 to April 2020, with the overall error within 3% as of now.