Congestion Risk Evaluation and Precaution of Passenger Flow in Metro Stations

Given the security problems of the urban rail transportation, this paper proposes a methodology for congestion risk evaluation and precaution in order to guarantee the safety of passengers and improve the operation efficiency in metro stations. To begin with, we selected the retention rate of the platform, the waiting rate of the ticket gate and the transfer efficiency as the indexes for the station congestion precaution system and created models to calculate the threshold respectively. By reasonably combining these three indexes, a congestion warning level function was set up to evaluate the congestion risk and determine the warning level. The characteristics of the proposed model are its quick decision results and ease of handling. With the determined warning level, some strategies are suggested to relieve the pressure. Finally, a practical application in Beijing’s GuoMao metro station was performed to verify the feasibility and practicability of the proposed congestion precaution model.