Congestion avoidance routing in urban rail transit networks

Agents in many transportation systems prefer to use the shortest paths, which may not guarantee the optimal transporting efficiency. Given that passengers in some big urban rail transit (URT) systems experience severe congestions, here we developed a congestion avoidance routing model. Based on the Beijing Subway data, the usage patterns of the URT network were comprehensively analyzed under the scenarios of shortest path (SP) routing and minimum cost (MC) routing. We found that MC routing can considerably reduce congestion in the URT network with a tiny increase of travel time. Interestingly, encouraging a small fraction of passengers who experience the most congestion to adopt MC routing achieves nearly the same effect with pure MC routing on mitigating congestion. Hence, a hybrid routing model was proposed to offer practical solutions for alleviating passenger congestion in the URT networks.