Master equation approach to the intra-urban passenger flow and application to the Metropolitan Seoul Subway system

摘要

The master equation approach is proposed to describe the evolution ofpassengers in a subway system. With the transition rate constructed from simplegeographical consideration, the evolution equation for the distribution ofsubway passengers is found to bear skew distributions including log-normal,Weibull, and power-law distributions. This approach is then applied to theMetropolitan Seoul Subway system: Analysis of the trip data of all passengersin a day reveals that the data in most cases fit well to the log-normaldistributions. Implications of the results are also discussed.