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At metro junction stations located in transportation hubs, a great number of passengers need to transfer to the metro system from other transportation modes during peak hours. This paper proposes a new train operation strategy—reserving carriages dynamically on each service train at the departure station for the metro junction station, which aims to relieve the serious passenger accumulation at the target station. We construct a nonlinear integer programming model which determines the number of reserved carriages on each train, and the total risk levels of passenger accumulation and passenger waiting time are both taken into account in the objective function. Furthermore, the latest arrival time of passengers on board is introduced to calculate effective passenger loading times analytically. At last, a set of numerical experiments from Beijing Metro Line 4 are implemented to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metro lines of some mega cities usually suffer from extreme congestions in peak hours, leading to serious operation risks. To relieve the extreme saturation for overcrowded metro lines, this study explores a novel train operation strategy, i.e., flexibly allocating the capacities through reserving carriages at different stations according to the time-variant passenger demand. With this strategy, the train capacities are reasonably distributed to each station, especially for stations with large passenger flows, so as to balance the passenger accumulation over the whole line. A nonlinear integer programming model is developed by considering the passenger dynamics, and an efficient variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithm is developed to solve the problem of interest. Finally, a set of numerical experiments with real-world data from Beijing metro Batong line are conducted to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm. The experimental results show that our proposed approach can effectively obtain high-quality carriage reservation plans in a short computing time, and the generated plans can well balance the passenger accumulation at all involved stations. • We flexibly allocate capacities through reserving and releasing carriages in each service-train. • We formulate a nonlinear integer programming model to optimize the problem of interest. • We design an effective variable neighborhood search algorithm to solve the problem. • We present numerical experiments to quantify the potential benefits of our methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]