Efficient Bilevel Approach for Urban Rail Transit Operation With Stop-Skipping

The train scheduling problem for urban rail transit systems is considered with the aim of minimizing the total travel time of passengers and the energy consumption of the trains. We adopt a model-based approach, where the model includes the operation of trains at the terminus and at the stations. In order to adapt the train schedule to the origin-destination-dependent passenger demand in the urban rail transit system, a stop-skipping strategy is adopted to reduce the passenger travel time and the energy consumption. An efficient bilevel optimization approach is proposed to solve this train scheduling problem, which actually is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem. The performance of the new efficient bilevel approach is compared with the existing bilevel approach. In addition, we also compare the stop-skipping strategy with the all-stop strategy. The comparison is performed through a case study inspired by real data from the Beijing Yizhuang line. The simulation results show that the efficient bilevel approach and the existing bilevel approach have a similar performance but the computation time of the efficient bilevel approach is around one magnitude smaller than that of the bilevel approach.