Recently, an open-source light-weight dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) package, namely DTALite, has been developed to allow a rapid utilization of advanced dynamic traffic analysis capabilities. Aiming to bridge the modeling gaps between multi-agent simulation and optimization in a multimodal environment, we further design and develop DTALite-S to simplify the traffic flow dynamic representation details in DTALite for future extensions. We hope to offer a unified modeling framework with inherently consistent space–time network representations for both optimization formulation and simulation process. This paper includes three major modeling components: (1) mathematic formulations to describe traffic and public transportation simulation problem on a space–time network; (2) transportation transition dynamics involving multiple agents in the optimization process; (3) an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based modeling structure to link different features between multi-agent simulation and optimization used in transportation. This unified framework can be embedded in a Lagrangian relaxation method and a time-oriented sequential simulation procedure to handle many general applications. We carried out a case study by using this unified framework to simulate the  passenger traveling process in Beijing subway network which contains 18 urban rail transit lines, 343 stations, and 52 transfer stations. Via the ADMM-based solution approach, queue lengths at platforms, in-vehicle congestion levels and absolute deviation of travel times are obtained within 1560 seconds.The case study indicate that the open-source DTALite-S integrates simulation and optimization procedure for complex dynamic transportation systems and can efficiently generate comprehensive space-time traveling status.

Aerial ropeway is an effective alternative to the conventional modes of land public transport in metropolitan areas and cities. Construction of passenger aerial ropeways in urban environment is a very costly enterprise in terms of engineering and economics, and requires significant financial resources. This article is aimed at the development of the design method of the passenger aerial ropeway, ensuring the reduction in its construction cost. For this purpose, the individual components of the construction cost are considered, and the approximate calculation dependencies are proposed. It is shown that the cost of the aerial ropeway is mainly influenced by the installation step, height of intermediate towers and carrying rope tension. The task of the conditional nonlinear optimization of the given parameters is formulated and solved in the research. This task ensures the minimum cost of the aerial ropeway. The optimization task is done by taking into account possible limitations on the ropeway laying in the severely urbanized environment (the terrain, urban infrastructure arrangement, altitude performance of the urban development, technical characteristics of the carrying rope, etc.). Implementing the solution findings of the given optimization task makes it possible to significantly reduce the construction cost of aerial ropeways in urban environment.

Media reports on train mishaps and havocs emanating from rooftop riding abound; however, there has been very limited effort on the empirical investigation of why daredevils embark on this utter suicide mission. Besides, studies that rigorously examined profiles of the perpetrators of the dastardly act are hard to come by in the literature of railway transport. Against this background, this study examined the menace of train rooftop riding in Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria, with a view to evolving a policy response that could curtail the life-threatening nuisance. Towards achieving this aim, specific objectives were formulated. These were to examine the socioeconomic characteristics of train rooftop riders in Lagos Metropolis, determine the motivations for train rooftop riding in the study area, assess the efforts made by the authorities to discourage train rooftop riding in the study area, and proffer policy recommendations towards engendering a safe rail transport milieu. Data were obtained through participant observation, interview and questionnaire administration. The respondents comprised 64 conveniently sampled rooftop riders, 183 law-abiding passengers of three Diesel Multiple Units and three Mass Transit Trains selected using multistage sampling, and the 113 staff members of the Nigerian Railway Corporation consisting of 20 engineers, 79 conductors and 14 ticket vendors. The study found that train rooftop riding had defied all the measures taken against it in the study area. It characterized most trips but was prevalent at the morning and evening peak periods (35.2% and 59.2%, respectively). All the rooftop riders were middle-aged men. None of them admitted to ever falling off before; however, 28 (43.8%) admitted to being scared of falling off, while 40 (62.5%) boasted they could not possibly fall off. Two categories of motivations for rooftop riding were found: ‘perceived’ and ‘real’. Smoking (47.0%), substance abuse (23.0%) and criminal tendencies (19.7%) were among the perceived motivations, while space inadequacy (37.5%), queue avoidance (50.0%) and adventure (34.4%) were among the real motivations. Given an overall improvement in the railway services, 28 (43.8%) would stop, 18 (28.1%) would not stop, and 18 (28.1%) were unsure they would stop rooftop riding. The study concluded that the menace of train rooftop riding was undesirable. Consequently, practical policy recommendations were proffered towards curbing the menace.

One of the main infrastructures in rail transportation is metro station. Obviously, analyzing and improving the capacity of the stations will ultimately lead to improved performance of the overall network. The capacity of metro station is the ability of the station and its associated spaces to create safety and comfort for the number of passengers expected to use the station. In this research, volume of passengers in the Shohada Square metro station has been used and simulated using VISSIM software. By the results of the simulation and regarding TCRP manual, six scenarios were analyzed in this research and different conditions were evaluated. Two main solutions for improving the performance of station were considered. It shows that the decision to remove the manual ticket purchase location will result in a 43% improvement in the performance of control space section and the approach to reducing the headway of trains from 240 s to 180 s will increase the amount of accessible space for each pedestrian in the platform to 35%. The method presented in this study can be used to evaluate and analyze other metro stations and even other transportation network stations.

The rapid increases in the quantity of data being gathered regarding technological systems such as railways can promote improvements in their design and operation. Combining information from different datasets allows more in-depth analysis, such as using train location data to enhance the analysis of speed profiles and energy consumption. Positioning systems such as GPS are frequently used to obtain this information, but are not necessarily always available, such as in underground metro systems. The focus of this paper is therefore the development of algorithms to derive train location information from measured speed profile data and network topology. Two different algorithms were developed to extract individual station-to-station journeys from an example consisting of a dataset of speed profiles and energy consumption from an urban rail system, and four classification algorithms were developed to identify the station pairs associated with each journey. It was found that the best-performing approach for this task was to compare the cumulative distance of a group of several consecutive journeys against a database of station-to-station distances to find the best match. This was more resilient than constructing sequences of consecutive journeys from possible matches in a database of station-to-station distances and orders of magnitude faster than heuristic algorithms.

The first sentence of Abstract should be “The rapid increases in the quantity of data being gathered from technological systems such as railways can be used to improve their design and operation”.