Optimization of Passenger and Freight Collaborative Transportation for Urban Rail Transit under Virtual Coupling Condition.

Urban rail transit has the potential to utilize surplus capacity to carry out urban freight transportation during off-peak periods. Based on the characteristics of virtual coupling operation and organization mode, this paper comprehensively considers the competition between passenger flow and freight flow, takes the train stopping plan and train carriage allocation as the main decision variables, and takes the minimization of passenger waiting time and the maximization of average full load rate as dual objectives to construct a multi-objective optimization model of passengerfreight collaborative transport scheme of urban rail transit under virtual coupling conditions. The multi-objective optimization model is developed to obtain the system optimization of the train stopping plan, running plan, carriage allocation plan, and passenger-freight collaborative transport plan. Numerical experiments are designed to verify the model's validity, using Wuxi Metro Line 3 as an example, and the NSGA-II algorithm solves all experiments. The results of the algorithm show that, compared to the traditional single passenger transport with a fixed large coupling, the scheme in this paper can simultaneously improve the average full capacity of the whole line by about 38.5% during the study period with only 0.65 minutes increase in the average passenger waiting time for the same number of rolling stocks, which can effectively shorten passenger travel time and improve the quality of passenger service in urban rail transit while ensuring transport efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]