Network-wide Timetabling for Urban Railway Network based on Complex Network Theory: A Beijing Subway Case Study

Urban railway timetable optimization has been widely studied, and most previous studies were focused on one or a few lines to increase network capacity and energy efficiency etc. In this paper, a network-wide timetable optimization is proposed based on the complex network theory. A concept of "social resource consumption" (SRC) is proposed to denote the product of travel time and passenger number for one inter-station interval (the section between two adjacent stations), is proposed to define the total network efficiency of the entire rail transit network. Lower SRC generally implies that network delivers more passenger with less time in each inter-station interval. In the proposed optimization model, the product of estimated passenger number and edge betweenness centrality has a direct impact on the time allocation for each interstation interval, i.e. the higher product value, implying higher weighting on the interval, tends to have a lower time allocation subject to the line time constraints and inter-station time constraints. A case study of Beijing subway is conducted to optimize the network-wide timetable and investigate the affecting factors of SRC in the network.