A syncretic railway network (SRN) that comprises the railway, regional railway, and urban rail transit is the cornerstone for the socio-economic development of urban agglomerations. Most existing research studies consider a syncretic network as a single network, and therefore, they cannot capture the interdependent patterns in the network. Thus, the characteristics of interdependent node/edges and robustness of the interdependent critical infrastructure of the SRN remain under-researched. In this study, we investigated the critical infrastructure interdependent networks (CIINs) of the SRN. To this end, we designed a cascading failure model based on the real data of the CIINs of the SRN in the Chengdu–Chongqing urban agglomeration, and we examined the cascading failure in both the syncretic and single networks. Our results indicate that robustness decreased with increasing the number of layers for a targeted attack on the highest connected nodes of the theoretical coupled network. The robustness of the theoretical coupled network was inferior to that of the single-layer network, whereas the robustness of the actual network was contrary to this result. The robustness of the CIINs in the SRN with different coupled modes increased with an increase in the number of nodes/sections of the single-layer network forming the interdependent network. However, it decreased with an increasing number of interdependent nodes/sections. Further, the robustness of a load-based SRN was found to be extremely sensitive to the failure of higher-load stations, therefore, it is important to facilitate decision-making processes in the daily operations and emergency management of the SRN.

Short-term metro passenger flow forecasting is an essential component of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and can be applied to optimize the passenger flow organization of a station and offer data support for metro passenger flow early warning and system management. LSTM neural networks have recently achieved remarkable recent in the field of natural language processing (NLP) because they are well suited for learning from experience to predict time series. For this purpose, we propose an empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-based long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network model for predicting short-term metro inbound passenger flow. The EMD algorithm decomposes the original sequential passenger flow into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residual. Selected IMFs that are strongly correlated with the original data can be obtained via feature selection. The selected IMFs and the original data are integrated into inputs for LSTM neural networks, and a single LSTM prediction model and an EMD-LSTM hybrid forecasting model are developed. Finally, historical real automatic fare collection (AFC) data from metro passengers are collected from Chengdu Metro to verify the validity of the proposed EMD-LSTM prediction model. The results indicate that the proposed EMD-LSTM hybrid forecasting model outperforms the LSTM, ARIMA and BPN models.

Origin-destination (OD) short-term passenger flow forecasting (OD STPFF) in urban rail transit (URT) is essential for developing timely network measures. The capacity utilization ratios of critical sections are key factors in developing these measures. The OD pairs passing through critical sections require a higher prediction accuracy than others; however, most studies have raised equal concerns on the prediction accuracy of each OD pair, namely, prediction at the network level. To address this problem, we raise heterogeneous time-variant concerns on OD pairs and employ an operation-oriented deep-learning architecture called the spatiotemporal convolutional neural network (STCNN) for realizing short-term OD passenger flow prediction. The architecture contains OD pair importance calculation, lagged spatiotemporal relationship construction, lagged spatiotemporal learning, real-time information learning, and sequential-temporal learning blocks. To this end, critical OD pairs are ascertained first, and the topological lagged spatiotemporal relationship among critical OD pairs are constructed and then normalized into grid-shaped data. The third block utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn the grid-shaped lagged spatiotemporal feature and real-time information in parallel. A temporal convolutional neural network (TCN) is utilized for learning the sequential-temporal feature at last. Further, we design a time-varying weighted masked loss function to jointly reinforce the concerns on critical OD pairs during model training. Finally, we test the proposed STCNN and its components on a field dataset from Chengdu Metro. Although the proposed STCNN performs only slightly better at the network level than the other models, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant superiority on critical OD pairs.

The advantage of multimodal transport is that it can deliver the goods to their destination in a reasonable combination of transport modes while ensuring security and punctuality. Multimodal transportation can effectively reduce logistics costs, improve logistics efficiency, and reduce environmental pollution. In the process of multimodal transportation, due to the interference of natural factors (weather, terrain, etc.) and some special human factors, it may have different degrees of impact on the transportation time and transportation safety of different transportation modes. Therefore, when choosing a transportation method, it is necessary to consider the transportation time and transportation safety under the interference. However, the current research on multimodal transport has not considered the impact of external interference on transportation time and transportation safety. Compared with other modes of transportation, external interference has a relatively small impact on railway transportation. Railways can safely deliver goods to their destinations on time. Under the background of China’s huge railway network and advanced heavy-duty technology, this paper establishes a multimodal transport route selection model for considering railway as the core, introduces time penalty cost and damage compensation cost, and takes the lowest comprehensive transportation cost as the model objective under the premise of considering transportation reliability and transportation safety. Finally, taking a multimodal transport network in China as an example, an improved ant colony algorithm is used to solve the model and the results verify the rationality of the model.