Smart technology used to handle Metro crowds

Featuring more than 700 kilometers of rail and receiving over 10 million passengers every day, Shanghai's Metro network is one of the largest and busiest in the world. Cutting-edge technology is now helping to improve management over the entire system.

Artificial intelligence technology has been applied to five of the city's busiest Metro stations so far, according to operators.

At Huinan Station on Line 16, operators can turn on the entire station — including lighting, surveillance cameras, escalators and the communication system — via a computer screen within five minutes from 5:40am, with automatic error checks enabled.

Morning rush hours see big crowds at this station in the direction of Longyang Road, and passenger restriction measures are now applied with smart computing.

Computers calculate the number of entering passengers, as well as rider counts on arriving trains and the number of people waiting at stations down the line. This data is used to determine how many people will be allowed into the station for the next train.

"This enables the station to run beyond the naked eyes of staff and at the same time to offer a better experience for the passengers," said Shen Li, director of the station.

In downtown Shanghai, Hanzhong Road Station on Lines 1, 12 and 13 handles about 250,000 passengers every day.

At this station, high-resolution smart cameras installed at each of the entrances count passengers and create a thermodynamic chart on a large screen in the surveillance room. Cameras on the platform areas enable staff to have a complete overview of the whole area from the surveillance room.

Xinjiangwancheng Station on Line 10, Zhuguang Road Station on Line 17 and Gucun Park Station on Line 7 are three other stations with smart solutions deployed since 2018. Due to large crowds at East Xujing Station on Line 2 for the China International Import Expo, similar solutions have been applied there for the occasion, too.

"The principle is to make all equipment, the environment and the passenger flows countable, and then work out the necessary solutions on an integrated system with the data collected," said Zhang Lidong, director of the system integration research department at the Metro company's technology center.

Also, since last year, a smart system which analyzes and deals with signal errors has been in place and reduced the Metro company's maintenance cost by 20 percent, with common errors and time spent on repairs three times less frequent than before, according to the company.

The smart system also shortens the intervals of trains running on the city's Metro network, with the latest national record achieved on Line 9 — under two minutes.

Currently, the Metro network handles 66 percent of the city's daily passengers using the public transportation system.

By 2040, Shanghai is expected to expand its Metro network to over 1,000 kilometers of rail.