An Integrated Control Model for Headway Regulation and Energy Saving in Urban Rail Transit

In an urban rail transit system, issues regarding headway regulation have aroused wide attention. The assurance of headway regularity can decrease train delay times and average passenger waiting times. An integrated control method is proposed to optimize train headway by adjusting the train arrival time at stations. The adjustment of train arrival time is achieved by using an analytical method, and then the speed profile for each train is calculated by a suboptimal method, which has been applied in a practical system. Through simulation, the CPU time for calculating optimal train arrival time and speed profile is analyzed, respectively. The analysis demonstrates that the proposed method satisfies the real-time requirements for solving the headway regulation problem. By adopting the proposed method, the average passenger waiting time and the energy consumption can be decreased. In particular, the proposed method has better performance when the dispatch headway is large.