Identification of dynamic bottlenecks of urban rail transit stations

Bottleneck identification is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed in the planning, design and operation management of urban rail transit stations. Based on the concepts of existing static bottlenecks and dynamic bottlenecks, dynamic bottlenecks were classified into two categories, i.e. primary bottlenecks and secondary bottlenecks, according to the causes of dynamic bottlenecks. The dynamic bottleneck transmission characteristics were studied, and the correlation bottleneck and bottleneck cluster concepts were proposed to describe the bottleneck transmission mechanism, whereby a new bottleneck identification method was proposed. Supported by bottleneck cluster concept, quantitative analysis was conducted on the effect of the capacity of an individual facility on collection and distribution capacity of the station, and sensitivity analysis-based bottleneck relief strategy was proposed. Finally, a case study of a station in Beijing subway was implemented to verify the validity and practicability of the proposed method. The results showed that this method can identify the bottlenecks of a station effectively, and define the dependence correlation between bottlenecks and importance of the bottlenecks. Compared with the existing methods, this method reduced the number of simulation times by 66.7%, which can improve the efficiency of bottleneck identification significantly. ©, 2015, Science Press. All right reserved.