Physics Guided Deep Learning-Based Model for Short-Term Origin–Destination Demand Prediction in Urban Rail Transit Systems Under Pandemic

Accurate origin–destination (OD) demand prediction is crucial for the efficient operation and management of urban rail transit (URT) systems, particularly during a pandemic. However, this task faces several limitations, including real-time availability, sparsity, and high-dimensionality issues, and the impact of the pandemic. Consequently, this study proposes a unified framework called the physics-guided adaptive graph spatial–temporal attention network (PAG-STAN) for metro OD demand prediction under pandemic conditions. Specifically, PAG-STAN introduces a real-time OD estimation module to estimate real-time complete OD demand matrices. Subsequently, a novel dynamic OD demand matrix compression module is proposed to generate dense real-time OD demand matrices. Thereafter, PAG-STAN leverages various heterogeneous data to learn the evolutionary trend of future OD ridership during the pandemic. Finally, a masked physics-guided loss function (MPG-loss function) incorporates the physical quantity information between the OD demand and inbound flow into the loss function to enhance model interpretability. PAG-STAN demonstrated favorable performance on two real-world metro OD demand datasets under the pandemic and conventional scenarios, highlighting its robustness and sensitivity for metro OD demand prediction. A series of ablation studies were conducted to verify the indispensability of each module in PAG-STAN.