Passenger flow prediction from AFC data using station memorizing LSTM for metro rail systems

Metro rail systems are increasingly becoming relevant and inevitable in the context of rising demand for sustainable transportation methods. Metros are therefore going to have a consistently expanding user-base and hence user satisfaction will require meticulous planning. Usage forecast is clearly an integral component of metro planning as it enables forward looking and efficient allocation of resources leading to greater commuter satisfaction. An observation from studying the usage of Kochi Metro Rail Ltd. is that there is a consistently occurring temporal pattern in usage for every station. But the patterns differ from station to station. This hinders the search for a global model representing all stations. We propose a way to overcome this by using station memorizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) which takes in stations in encoded form as input along with usage sequence of stations. This is observed to significantly improve the performance of the model. The proposed architecture with station parameter is compared with algorithms like SVR (support vector regression) and neural network implementation with the best architecture to testify the claim. The proposed model can predict the future flow with an error rate of 0.00127 MSE (mean squared error), which is better than the other models tested.