Search Results (20)

Origin–destination (OD) matrix forecasting is essential for urban railway operations because it enables simultaneous understanding of the direction and magnitude of passenger flows. However, OD matrices in large-scale subway networks are difficult to predict owing to their high dimensionality and sparsity, and existing approaches often rely on station-level predictions or complex structural designs. This study addresses the offline full-matrix OD forecasting problem, where complete historical OD sequences are available at prediction time, and proposes Metro-GATF, a spatiotemporal forecasting framework that jointly models railway topology and dynamic OD interactions. The model employs a GATv2-based spatial encoder to learn static inter-station relationships and encodes time-varying interactions using sparse OD graphs. A non-autoregressive transformer decoder generates future multi-step node representations in parallel, whereas origin–destination factorization and sparsity-aware gating are used to reconstruct the full OD matrix. Experiments on minute-level AFC-based OD data from a 637-station metropolitan subway network demonstrated that Metro-GATF achieved the lowest sMAPE among the compared full-matrix models. These results indicate that the proposed framework effectively captures complex spatiotemporal OD patterns and offers a practical end-to-end framework for forecasting urban railway demand. Full article

Accurate short-term metro passenger flow forecasting plays a key role in urban transit management, supporting train scheduling, crowd control, and operational planning. Jointly modeling station-level inflow/outflow (IO) and inter-station origin–destination flows (OD/DO) has proven effective for improving prediction accuracy, as it allows the model to leverage dependencies across different flow granularities. However, effectively exploiting such dependencies remains nontrivial. Station-level intensity (IO) and inter-station migration patterns (OD/DO) differ substantially in both representation and dynamics, and the dependencies between them are inherently directional and uneven. As a result, commonly used parameter-sharing mechanisms in multi-task learning are often insufficient to capture informative cross-task interactions. To address this issue, we propose CATI (Cross-Attention-based Task Interaction), a unified framework for joint multi-granular metro flow forecasting. CATI first learns task-specific spatiotemporal representations for IO, OD, and DO flows, and then introduces directed cross-attention with Gated Residual Fusion to model selective and asymmetric interactions across tasks. In addition, an aggregation-consistency regularization is employed to maintain structural coherence between station-level and inter-station predictions. Experiments on real-world metro datasets from Hangzhou and Shanghai show that CATI consistently outperforms strong baselines across multiple prediction horizons and tasks. Further analysis indicates that the model learns adaptive attention patterns, task-dependent gating behaviors, and controlled interaction strengths, which together explain its improved performance. These results suggest that explicitly modeling asymmetric cross-task interactions is important for multi-granular spatiotemporal forecasting in metro systems. Full article

Urban rail transit networks in developing countries are rapidly expanding, entering a networked operational phase where accurate passenger flow forecasting is crucial for optimizing vehicle scheduling, resource allocation, and transportation efficiency. In the short term, accurate real-time forecasting enables the dynamic adjustment of train headways and crew deployment, reducing average passenger waiting times during peak hours and alleviating platform overcrowding; in the long term, reliable trend predictions support strategic planning, including capacity expansion, station retrofitting, and energy management. This paper proposes a novel hybrid forecasting model, EEMD-TiDE, that combines improved Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) with a Time Series Dense Encoder (TiDE) to enhance prediction accuracy. The EEMD algorithm effectively overcomes mode mixing issues in traditional EMD by incorporating white noise perturbations, decomposing raw passenger flow data into physically meaningful Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). At the same time, the TiDE model, a linear encoder–decoder architecture, efficiently handles multi-scale features and covariates without the computational overhead of self-attention mechanisms. Experimental results using Xi’an Metro passenger flow data (2017–2019) demonstrate that EEMD-TiDE significantly outperforms baseline models. This study provides a robust solution for urban rail transit passenger flow forecasting, supporting sustainable urban development. Full article

Short-term passenger flow prediction provides critical data-driven support for optimizing resource allocation, guiding passenger mobility, and enhancing risk response capabilities in urban rail transit systems. To further improve prediction accuracy, this study proposes a hybrid SMA-VMD-Informer-BiLSTM prediction model. Addressing the challenge of error propagation caused by non-stationary components (e.g., noise and abrupt fluctuations) in conventional passenger flow signals, the Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) method is introduced to decompose raw flow data into multiple intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). A Slime Mould Algorithm (SMA)-based optimization mechanism is designed to adaptively tune VMD parameters, effectively mitigating mode redundancy and information loss. Furthermore, to circumvent error accumulation inherent in serial modeling frameworks, a parallel prediction architecture is developed: the Informer branch captures long-term dependencies through its ProbSparse self-attention mechanism, while the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network extracts localized short-term temporal patterns. The outputs of both branches are fused via a fully connected layer, balancing global trend adherence and local fluctuation characterization. Experimental validation using historical entry flow data from Weihouzhuang Station on Xi’an Metro demonstrated the superior performance of the SMA-VMD-Informer-BiLSTM model. Compared to benchmark models (CNN-BiLSTM, CNN-BiGRU, Transformer-LSTM, ARIMA-LSTM), the proposed model achieved reductions of 7.14–53.33% in $f_{mse}$, 3.81–31.14% in $f_{rmse}$, and 8.87–38.08% in $f_{mae}$, alongside a 4.11–5.48% improvement in $R^2$. Cross-station validation across multiple Xi’an Metro hubs further confirmed robust spatial generalizability, with prediction errors bounded within $f_{mse}$: 0.0009–0.01, $f_{rmse}$: 0.0303–0.1, $f_{mae}$: 0.0196–0.0697, and $R^2$: 0.9011–0.9971. Furthermore, the model demonstrated favorable predictive performance when applied to forecasting passenger inflows at multiple stations in Nanjing and Zhengzhou, showcasing its excellent spatial transferability. By integrating multi-level, multi-scale data processing and adaptive feature extraction mechanisms, the proposed model significantly mitigates error accumulation observed in traditional approaches. These findings collectively indicate its potential as a scientific foundation for refined operational decision-making in urban rail transit management, thereby significantly promoting the sustainable development and long-term stable operation of urban rail transit systems. Full article

Establishing a high-precision passenger flow prediction model is a critical and complex task for the optimization of urban rail transit systems. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, the data-driven technology has been widely studied in the intelligent transportation system. In this study, a neural network model based on the data-driven technology is established for the prediction of passenger flow in multiple urban rail transit stations to enable smart perception for optimizing urban railway transportation. The integration of network units with different specialities in the proposed model allows the network to capture passenger flow data, temporal correlation, spatial correlation, and spatiotemporal correlation with the dual attention mechanism, further improving the prediction accuracy. Experiments based on the actual passenger flow data of Beijing Metro Line 13 are conducted to compare the prediction performance of the proposed data-driven model with the other baseline models. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed prediction model achieves lower MAE and RMSE in passenger flow prediction, and its fitted curve more closely aligns with the actual passenger flow data. This demonstrates the model’s practical potential to enhance intelligent transportation system management through more accurate passenger flow forecasting. Full article

To address the issues of slow convergence and large errors in existing metaheuristic algorithms when optimizing neural network-based subway passenger flow prediction, we propose the following improvements. First, we replace the random initialization method of the population in the SSA with Circle mapping to enhance its diversity and quality. Second, we introduce a hybrid mechanism combining dimensional small-hole imaging backward learning and Cauchy mutation, which improves the diversity of the individual sparrow selection of optimal positions and helps overcome the algorithm’s tendency to become trapped in local optima and premature convergence. Finally, we enhance the individual sparrow position update process by integrating a cosine strategy with an inertia weight adjustment, which improves the algorithm’s global search ability, effectively balancing global search and local exploitation, and reducing the risk of local optima and insufficient convergence precision. Based on the analysis of the correlation between different types of subway station passenger flows and weather factors, the ISSA is used to optimize the hyperparameters of the CNN-LSTM model to construct a subway passenger flow prediction model based on ISSA-CNN-LSTM. Simulation experiments were conducted using card swipe data from Harbin Metro Line 1. The results show that the ISSA provides a more accurate optimization with the average values and standard deviations of the 12 benchmark test function simulations being closer to the optimal values. The ISSA-CNN-LSTM model outperforms the SSA-CNN-LSTM, PSO-ELMAN, GA-BP, CNN-LSTM, and LSTM models in terms of error evaluation metrics such as MAE, RMSE, and MAPE, with improvements ranging from 189.8% to 374.6%, 190.9% to 389.5%, and 3.3% to 6.7%, respectively. Moreover, the ISSA-CNN-LSTM model exhibits the smallest variation in prediction errors across different types of subway stations. The ISSA demonstrates superior parameter optimization accuracy and convergence speed compared to the SSA. The ISSA-CNN-LSTM model is suitable for the precise prediction of passenger flow at different types of subway stations, providing theoretical and data support for subway station passenger density and trend forecasting, passenger organization and management, risk emergency response, and the improvement of service quality and operational safety. Full article

Short-term origin–destination (OD) passenger flow forecasting is crucial for urban rail transit enterprises aiming to optimise transportation products and increase operating income. As there are large-scale OD pairs in an urban rail transit system, OD passenger flow cannot be obtained in real time (temporal hysteresis). Additionally, the distribution characteristics are also complex. Previous studies mainly focus on passenger flow prediction at metro stations, while few methods solve the OD passenger flow prediction problems of an urban rail transit system. In view of this, we propose a novel deep learning method fusing high-dimensional features (HDF-DL) with multi-source data. The HDF-DL method is combined with three modules. The temporal module incorporates the time-varying, trend, and cyclic characteristics of OD passenger flow, while the latest OD passenger flow time sequence (within 1 h) is excluded from the time-varying characteristics. In the spatial module, the K-means and K-shape algorithms are used to classify OD pairs from multiple perspectives and capture the spatial features, reducing the difficulty of OD passenger flow predictions with large-scale and complex characteristics. Weather factors are considered in the external feature module. The HDF-DL method is tested on a large-scale metro system in China, in which eight baseline models are designed. The results show that the HDF-DL method achieves high prediction accuracy across multiple time granularities, with a mean absolute percentage error of about 10%. OD passenger flow in every departure time interval can be predicted with high and stable accuracy, effectively capturing temporal characteristics. The modular design of HDF-DL, which fuses high-dimensional features and employs appropriate neural networks for different data types, significantly reduces prediction errors and outperforms baseline models. Full article

Accurate estimation of transportation flow is a challenging task in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Transporting data with dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies elevates transportation flow forecasting to a significant issue for operational planning, managing passenger flow, and arranging for individual travel in a smart city. The task is challenging due to the composite spatial dependency on transportation networks and the non-linear temporal dynamics with mobility conditions changing over time. To address these challenges, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (ST-GCRN) that learns from both the spatial stations network data and time series of historical mobility changes in order to estimate transportation flow at a future time. The model is based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) in order to further improve the accuracy of transportation flow estimation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets of transportation flow, New York bike-sharing system and Hangzhou metro system, prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Compared to the current state-of-the-art baselines, it decreases the estimation error by 98% in the metro system and 63% in the bike-sharing system. Full article

This research introduces a hybrid deep learning approach to perform real-time forecasting of passenger traffic flow for the metro railway system (MRS). By integrating long short-term memory (LSTM) and the graph convolutional network (GCN), a hybrid deep learning neural network named the graph convolutional memory network (GCMN) was constructed and trained for accurate real-time prediction of passenger traffic flow for the MRS. Data collected of the traffic flow in Delhi’s metro rail network system in the period from October 2012 to May 2017 were utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed model. The results indicate that (1) the developed method provides accurate predictions of the traffic flow with an average coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.920, RMSE of 368.364, and MAE of 549.527, and (2) the GCMN model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including LSTM and the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM). This study contributes to the state of practice in proposing a novel framework that provides reliable estimations of passenger traffic flow. The developed model can also be used as a benchmark for planning and upgrading works of the MRS by metro owners and architects. Full article

The accurate forecasting of short-term subway passenger flow is beneficial for promoting operational efficiency and passenger satisfaction. However, the nonlinearity and nonstationarity of passenger flow time series bring challenges to short-term passenger flow prediction. To solve this challenge, a prediction model based on improved variational mode decomposition (IVMD) and multi-model combination is proposed. Firstly, the mixed-strategy improved sparrow search algorithm (MSSA) is used to adaptively determine the parameters of the VMD with envelope entropy as the fitness value. Then, IVMD is applied to decompose the original passenger flow time series into several sub-series adaptively. Meanwhile, the sample entropy is utilized to divide the sub-series into high-frequency and low-frequency components, and different models are established to predict the sub-series with different frequencies. Finally, the MSSA is employed to determine the weight coefficients of each sub-series to combine the prediction results of the sub-series and get the final passenger flow prediction results. To verify the prediction performance of the established model, passenger flow datasets from four different types of Nanning Metro stations were taken as examples for carrying out experiments. The experimental results showed that: (a) The proposed hybrid model for short-term passenger flow prediction is superior to several baseline models in terms of both prediction accuracy and versatility. (b) The proposed hybrid model is excellent in multi-step prediction. Taking station 1 as an example, the MAEs of the proposed model are 3.677, 5.7697, and 8.1881, respectively, which can provide technical support for subway operations management. Full article

Accurate forecasting of the future transfer passenger flow from historical data is essential for helping travelers to adjust their trips, optimal resource allocation and alleviating traffic congestion. However, current studies have mainly emphasized predicting traffic parameters for a single type of transport, while lacking research into transfer passenger flow influenced by multiple factors across different transport modes. Additionally, efficient traffic prediction relies on high-quality traffic data, yet data loss issues are inevitable but often ignored. To fill these gaps, we present for the first time a reliable joint long short-term memory with matrix factorization deep learning model (i.e., Joint-IF) for accurate imputation and forecasting of transfer passenger flow between metro and bus. This hybrid Joint-IF model uses a repair-before-prediction strategy to deliver the final high-quality outputs. In particular, we simulate a variety of missing combinations under the natural conditions and apply a low-rank matrix factorization to infer those lost values. In addition, we investigate the effects of crucial parameters and spatiotemporal features on transfer flow prediction. To validate the effectiveness of Joint-IF, a large series of experiments are carried out for models’ comparison and validation on the real-world transfer passenger flow dataset of the Shenzhen public transport system, and the results show that the proposed Joint-IF performs better for both imputation and forecasting of transfer passenger flow relative to the baseline models in terms of accuracy and stability. Full article

At present, machine learning has been successfully applied in many fields and has achieved amazing results. Meanwhile, over the past few years, the pandemic has transformed the transportation industry. The two hot issues prompt us to rethink the traditional problem of passenger flow forecasting. As a special structure embedded in the machine learning model, the attention mechanism is used to automatically learn and calculate the contribution degree of input data to output data. Therefore, this paper uses the attention mechanism to find the best model to predict OD passenger flow under COVID-19. Holiday characteristics, minimum temperature, COVID-19 factors, and past origin-destination (OD) passenger flow were used as input characteristics. In the first stage, the attention mechanism was used to capture the advantages of the trained random forest, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), and Adaboost models, and then the MLP was trained. Afterward, the weight distribution of the two models is carried out by using the historical passenger flow. The multi-model attention+ MLP model was used to evaluate the OD passenger flow prediction of Dalian Metro Line 1 under COVID-19. All the possible choices in this process were taken as a comparison experiment. The results show that only the fusion model combining the attention mechanism of random forest and XGBoost with MLP has the highest prediction accuracy. Full article

The development of metro systems can be a good solution to many problems in urban transport and promote sustainable urban development. A metro system plays an important role in urban public transit, and the passenger-flow forecasting is fundamental to assisting operators in establishing an intelligent transport system (ITS). In order to accurately predict the passenger flow of urban metros in different periods and provide a scientific basis for schedule planning, a short-term metro passenger-flow prediction model is constructed by integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) to solve the problem that the existing empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is prone to modal aliasing. According to the processed metro-card data, the time series of historical OD data of metro passenger flow is obtained. After EEMD modal decomposition, several intrinsic mode functions sub-items and residual items are obtained. Then, an LSTM network is constructed for prediction. The time step of the network is decided according to the partial autocorrelation functions. The prediction results of intrinsic mode function (IMF) and residual items are integrated to obtain prediction results. The station is classified according to the land types around the station, and the model is tested by using the metro automatic fare collection (AFC) data. In order to test the actual prediction, a different number of training set samples are selected to predict. The measured data of the next day is continuously added to the original training set to compare the prediction accuracy. The results show that the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE) of the EEMD-LSTM model are better than the EMD-LSTM in predicting the OD value of commercial–residential stations and scenic–residential stations. Compared with the EMD-LSTM model, the EEMD-LSTM model showed an average reduction by 3.112% in MAPE values and 15.889 in RMSE, indicating that the EEMD-LSTM has higher prediction accuracy, and EEMD-LSTM model has higher accuracy in short-term metro passenger-flow prediction. The average MAPE for the 35-to-42-day historical data sample decreased from 13.02% to 10.39% with a decreasing trend. It shows that the prediction accuracy keeps improving as the training set samples increase. Full article

Accurate prediction of citywide short-term metro passenger flow is essential to urban management and transport scheduling. Recently, an increasing number of researchers have applied deep learning models to passenger flow prediction. Nevertheless, the task is still challenging due to the complex spatial dependency on the metro network and the time-varying traffic patterns. Therefore, we propose a novel deep learning architecture combining graph attention networks (GAT) with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, which is called the hybrid GLM (hybrid GAT and LSTM Model). The proposed model captures the spatial dependency via the graph attention layers and learns the temporal dependency via the LSTM layers. Moreover, some external factors are embedded. We tested the hybrid GLM by predicting the metro passenger flow in Shanghai, China. The results are compared with the forecasts from some typical data-driven models. The hybrid GLM gets the smallest root-mean-square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) in different time intervals (TIs), which exhibits the superiority of the proposed model. In particular, in the TI 10 min, the hybrid GLM brings about 6–30% extra improvements in terms of RMSE. We additionally explore the sensitivity of the model to its parameters, which will aid the application of this model. Full article

The metro system plays an important role in urban public transit, and the passenger flow forecasting is fundamental to assisting operators establishing an intelligent transport system (ITS). The forecasting results can provide necessary information for travelling decision of travelers and metro operations of managers. In order to investigate the inner characteristics of passenger flow and make a more accurate prediction with less training time, a novel model (i.e., SSA-AWELM), a combination of singular spectrum analysis (SSA) and AdaBoost-weighted extreme learning machine (AWELM), is proposed in this paper. SSA is developed to decompose the original data into three components of trend, periodicity, and residue. AWELM is developed to forecast each component desperately. The three predicted results are summed as the final outcomes. In the experiments, the dataset is collected from the automatic fare collection (AFC) system of Hangzhou metro in China. We extracted three weeks of passenger flow to carry out multistep prediction tests and a comparison analysis. The results indicate that the proposed SSA-AWELM model can reduce both predicted errors and training time. In particular, compared with the prevalent deep-learning model long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, SSA-AWELM has reduced the testing errors by 22% and saved time by 84%, on average. It demonstrates that SSA-AWELM is a promising approach for passenger flow forecasting. Full article