Travel Characteristics Analysis and Passenger Flow Prediction of Intercity Shuttles in the Pearl River Delta on Holidays

As China's urbanization process continues to accelerate, the demand for intercity residents' transportation has increased dramatically. Holiday travel has different demand characteristics, causing serious shortage during peak periods. However, current research barely focuses on the passenger flow prediction along with travel characteristics of intercity shuttles. Accurately predicting passenger flow during the holidays helps to improve operational organization efficiency and residents' satisfaction, and provides a basis for reasonable resource allocation by the management department. This paper analyzes the spatiotemporal characteristics of intercity shuttles passenger flow in the Pearl River Delta. Separate passenger flow prediction models on non-holiday and holiday are established using an improved genetic algorithm optimized back propagation neural network (IGA-BPNN) based on the characteristics of passenger flow, and the prediction models are validated based on panel data. The results of weekly flow show obvious holiday characteristics, and the hourly traffic flow of holidays is much larger than that of weekends and weekdays. There is a significant difference in the hourly flow between different holidays. The IGA-BPNN model used in this paper achieves lower prediction error relative to the benchmark BPNN approach (leads a two thirds reduction in MAPE, and an over 85% reduction in MSPE).