Abstract: Recently there has been a lot of interest in the train flow management community towards modeling and analysis of the urban rail traffic system. Traditionally, models used in urban rail traffic control and train flow management are based on simulating the trajectories of individual train. Starting from the macroscopic characteristics of the train flow in the road network, train flow rate and regulation measures are introduced on the basis of road network division of urban rail transit network. The premise for this research is that some of the optimization control problems can be addressed by better train flow management without any capacity enhancement. Different kinds of train queues are acquired according to the departure station and the destination station. For different road network spatial distribution structure, the constraint relationships between the input variables and the state variables are presented and the single queue traffic flow control model is established based on the train flow control mechanism. Furthermore, the deterministic traffic flow optimal control model incorporating multi-queue and multi-segment is putforward by incorporating the logic structure of train queues. The traffic flow control process is transformed into the optimal design problem of the control system using specific control objectives and it can provide decision making for the traffic flow scheduling. Finally, experiments on metro line elements are conducted that may have effects on traffic flow, with further discussing on possible improvements. The simulation results demonstrate that the method presented in this paper can provide effective decision making for metro train flow regulation.

Key words: subway stations; metropolitan area networks; optimization; mathematical models