Model predictive control of multi-line metro systems: A distributed approach

Metros are the principal means of public transportation in many of the world´s cities. Expanding metro infrastructure is costly, however, and at a certain point becomes unsustainable. When this occurs, the only feasible solution is to improve the management system. This can be done using either offline or online approaches. In this work, a distributed predictive control approach for multi-line metro systems is proposed. The metro system is partitioned into sub-systems each of them associated to a local predictive controller in charge of local optimization. Performance comparisons of the proposed distributed scheme with a fully decentralized and a simple control approach are presented, using average passengers wait time and train´s occupation as performance criteria. Results show that the distributed model predictive control scheme outperforms decentralized and simple control approaches.