Locating Flow Capturing Facilities on A Railway Network with Two Levels of Coverage

This paper presents a flow capturing location problem which focuses on railway passenger flows. The flow capturing location problem (FCLP), originally proposed by Hodgson (1990), aims to locate a given number of facilities on a network to maximize the total flow that can obtain service at facilities along their pre-planned routes. For railway users, facilities located at the origin station and the destination station are more easily accessible than facilities located midway along the path. Therefore, we differentiate these two cases by introducing two levels of coverage; a given flow is fully captured when captured at the origin station or the destination station, or partially captured when captured at a midway station along the path. We provide an integer programming formulation of the proposed problem. We apply the model to analyze the optimal locations of flow capturing facilities on Keio Line using commuter traffic flow data, which is extracted from transportation census data of Tokyo Metropolitan area.