Collection of passenger flow data and development of passenger flow maps in metro stations

Safety and efficiency have become two of the most important problems for metro system operations because of the ever growing patronage size. Collecting passenger flow data about flow, route choice and various other behaviors is a fundamental task towards understanding the crowd and controlling it. Static or location based passenger flow information, such as the flow through a particular escalator, can easily be counted. However, some other regional information which can be used to develop the “passenger flow map” of the whole station, such as passengers' walking path and the distribution of passengers on each path, cannot be easily acquired due to the difficulty in tracking individual passenger. This paper presents and compares several basic methods for collecting crowd flow data under station normal service condition and emergency evacuation drill exercise scenario. For normal service condition, the method aims at collecting passenger flow data of a whole metro station, analyzing the passenger travel patterns and assessing the crowding levels. The method is featured as a data synthetic procedure where the most reliable ticket gates data is used as the baseline and then distributed to each route forward and backward according to the proportions of passengers choosing each route. For the emergency evacuation drill scenario, two types of data sources including video camera records and RFID system are adopted. The different features of these two types of data sources, their advantages and disadvantages, the possible problems that may be encountered as well as the tricks that have been proved useful for solving those problems are introduced and discussed.