Hierarchical Forecast Reconciliation for Urban Rail Transit Demand Prediction under Operational Disruptions
For urban rail transit operators, this work provides a method to improve forecast consistency and accuracy during operational disruptions, where reliable predictions are most critical.
This paper introduces a hierarchical forecast reconciliation framework for urban rail transit demand prediction, ensuring coherent station-level and OD-level forecasts. The proposed neural Fully Connected Reconciler (FCR) reduces OD forecasting error by up to 17.45% under severe disruptions compared to classical methods.
Accurate and coherent passenger demand forecasting is essential for Urban Rail Transit (URT) operations. Passenger demand has a hierarchical structure in which origin-destination (OD) flows aggregate to station-level inflows and outflows through conservation constraints. In practice, station-level and OD-level forecasts are often generated independently, producing incoherent predictions that violate these constraints and introduce inconsistencies into operational decision-making. Such issues become more severe during disruptions, when forecasting reliability is most critical. This paper presents the first hierarchical forecast reconciliation framework for joint station-level and OD-level URT demand prediction. A neural Fully Connected Reconciler (FCR) learns a non-linear mapping from incoherent base forecasts to coherent hierarchical predictions while guaranteeing exact structural consistency by construction. The method is benchmarked against OLS, WLS, and Minimum Trace (MinT) variants using Rejsekort smart-card data from the Copenhagen S-train network under one-step, multi-step, and disruption forecasting scenarios. Results show that reconciliation consistently improves OD forecasting accuracy while ensuring hierarchical coherence. Under normal conditions, FCR performs competitively with MinT-based methods. An oracle analysis indicates that perfect station-level forecasts could reduce OD prediction error by up to 34 percent, highlighting the value of improved base forecasts. Under severe disruptions, FCR outperforms classical methods, reducing OD forecasting error by up to 17.45 percent in multi-step destination-side delay scenarios. These findings establish hierarchical reconciliation as an effective mechanism for improving forecast robustness, with the largest benefits occurring under the most challenging operating conditions.