Bottleneck identification in suburban railway stations considering facilities and flows

Suburban railways are a vital mode of transport for medium-to-long-distance urban travel, where passenger flow lines and station facilities directly affect operational efficiency and safety. However, stations on suburban railway lines are prone to localised passenger congestion due to unreasonable facility layouts and inefficient passenger-flow organisation, reducing efficiency and increasing safety risks. This study proposes a bottleneck identification method integrating static topology and dynamic passenger flow. Firstly, the station was described as a three-layer complex network: facility, service and flow layers. Improved betweenness centrality was applied to the static network composed of the facility and service layers to find static bottlenecks. Secondly, regarding identification of dynamic bottlenecks, considering passenger heterogeneity and path costs, the method of successive averages was used to solve the user equilibrium flow, and saturation and delay were used. Finally, the entropy weight method integrates static and dynamic indexes into a comprehensive model to quantify bottleneck causes. A case study at Zhongchun Road station of the Shanghai Suburban Railway shows that security inspection machines are the highest-ranked key bottleneck-risk facilities (score 0.9737), while a transfer escalator was classified as a key bottleneck-risk facility (Score 0.6189). The study supports station layout and passenger-flow optimisation.