Real-time Forecasting System of Commuters in the Public Railway Network

－ Use of a area type time-space network model －

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a real-time forecasting system of commuters in the public railway network in Tokyo metropolitan area. The system has the following characteristics: (1) It treats time dependent traffic demand. (2) It employs a timespace network which could honestly expresses the timetable of trains. (3) The whole route of each passenger from his/her origin to destination is considered. (4) It assigns each passenger to his/her route by solving user equilibrium flow assignment problem. We considered three applications to demonstrate usefulness of our system. The first is to forecast how many commuters would change their routes to use newly opened railway line "Tsukuba-Express". The second is to calculate change of the transportation capability by degrading express trains to local ones during the morning rush hours in Tokyu Den-en-toshi Line. The last is to estimate the effect of staggered departure of commuters to their offices in order to reduce congestion during the morning rush hours.