• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.116-128
• /
• 2011

Some subway passengers may want to have their fresh vegetables purchased through internet at a service facility within the subway station of the Metropolitan Seoul subway system on the way to home, which raises further questions about which stations are chosen to locate service facilities and how many passengers can use the facilities. This problem is well known as the pickup problem, and it can be solved on a traffic network with traffic flows which should be identified from origin stations to destination stations. Since flows of the subway passengers can be found from the smart card transaction database of the Metropolitan Seoul smart card system, the pickup problem in the Metropolitan Seoul subway system is to select subway stations for the service facilities such that captured passenger flows are maximized. In this paper, we have formulated a model of the pickup problem on the Metropolitan Seoul subway system with subway passenger flows, and have proposed a fast heuristic algorithm to select pickup stations which can capture the most passenger flows in each step from an origin-destination matrix which represents the passenger flows. We have applied the heuristic algorithm to select the pickup stations from a large volume of traffic network, the Metropolitan Seoul subway system, with about 400 subway stations and five millions passenger transactions daily. We have obtained not only the experimental results in fast response time, but also displayed the top 10 pickup stations in a subway guide map. In addition, we have shown that the resulting solution is nearly optimal by a few more supplementary experiments.