The Shrinking of Beijing and the Rising of Xiong’an: Optimize Population Migration in terms of Transport Service

Abstract

The population of Beijing has already come to its loading capacity. The China central government plans to build an ideal city named Xiong’an nearby Beijing. The city is expected to work as a carrying hub for noncapital functions of Beijing. The central government does not rush to build before a deliberated urban planning is accomplished. For sustainable development, a difficulty faced by urban planners is that the maximum number of people can be migrated from Beijing to Xiong’an with constraint on level of transport service. This paper developed a specialized bilevel programming model where the upper level is to ensure a predetermined transport service level regarding to population migration, while the lower level is feedback equilibrium between trip generation and traffic assignment. To be more specific, trip is generated by the gravity model, and traffic is assigned by the user equilibrium model. It is well known that the bilevel programming problem is tough and challenging. A try-and-error algorithm is designed for the upper-level model, and a method of successive average (MSA) is developed for the lower-level model. The effectiveness of the model and algorithm is validated by an experimental study using the current transport network between Beijing and Xiong’an. It shows that the methods can be very useful to identify the maximum population migration subject to level of transport service.