OhmicFlow: Forecasting transit passenger flow under extreme weather disruptions via Ohm's law

Abstract

As climate change intensifies, extreme weather events (EWEs) increasingly disrupt the supply-demand balance of mass transit systems. Accurate and reliable prediction of origin-destination (OD) passenger flow is essential for timely emergency response, but remains difficult under abnormal conditions. Although existing physics-informed methods can enhance model robustness, they remain insufficient for transit systems under extreme weather disruptions, where passenger flow fluctuations are jointly shaped by the redistribution of latent demand as a direct result of EWEs (i.e., direct effects) and the increase in travel impedance due to EWE-induced supply contraction and congestion effects (i.e., indirect effects). To address these limitations, we first conceptualize the transit network as an electrical circuit, treating latent demand as voltage, travel impedance as resistance and passenger flow as current, and then propose the OhmicFlow framework to jointly predict these variables under disruptions through Ohm's law. Specifically, a future-aware spatiotemporal backbone is used as an ammeter to predict disrupted passenger flow, and its replica is reused as a bypass voltmeter with impedance controlled in the inputs to infer latent demand counterfactually and in parallel. Travel impedance under foreseeable EWE disruptions is further modeled using a thermistor analogy, enabling dynamic estimation by coupling supply contraction with congestion effects. A multi-objective loss is incorporated to fit observed data while enforcing the Ohmic constraint. Empirical experiments based on 10 years of Shenzhen Metro data covering 17 EWEs show that OhmicFlow consistently outperforms various baseline methods, achieving lower prediction errors across various chronological training settings while improving uncertainty calibration, robustness, transferability, and interpretability.