Estimation of Passenger Route Choice Pattern Using Smart Card Data for Complex Metro Systems

Metro systems play an important role in meeting the demand for urban transportation in large cities. The understanding of passenger route choice is critical for public transit management. The wide deployment of automated fare collection (AFC) systems opens up a new opportunity. However, only each trip's tap-in and tap-out time stamp and stations can be directly obtained from AFC system records; the train and route chosen by a passenger are unknown, information necessary to solve our problem. While existing methods work well in some specific situations, they hardly work for complicated situations. In this paper, we propose a solution that needs no additional equipment or human involvement than the AFC systems. We develop a probabilistic model that can estimate from empirical analysis how the passenger flows are dispatched to different routes and trains. We validate our approach using a large-scale data set collected from the Shenzhen Metro system. The measured results provide us with useful input when building the passenger path choice model.