Abstract
Passenger stations are transit hubs where several railway lines interchange. They have important roles in providing train operations and passenger services. Interrelations between track layouts and technological performances are important for reducing bottleneck effects and raising the operational effectiveness of rail networks. To the best of our knowledge, in previous research the assessment of track layouts has not been considered with respect to various technological aspects including railway operations, safety, and passenger services but rather as a single criterion for analysis of different individual performance indicators. We propose a new two-phase decision making approach for the complex evaluation of track layout alternatives. The first phase model is a VIKOR method for ranking track layouts by criteria related to: railway capacity, safety issue, and passenger-pedestrian fluctuations. Next, in the second phase, we use marginal analysis to find Pareto front and compare the alternatives ratings by calculating performance-benefit coefficients. To show the applicability of the proposed model, we employ an illustrative example of a passenger rail station and evaluate six different track layout alternatives. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated comparing the proposed two-phase model with traditional VIKOR.
Highlights
From the early stages of rail development, passenger stations have been participating as a fundamental element of transportation systems
We propose the VIKOR method for ranking track layouts in terms of several technological criteria
Rail passenger station track layout design has to meet several conditions imposed by transport demand, safety and railway operating procedures
Summary
From the early stages of rail development, passenger stations have been participating as a fundamental element of transportation systems. In parallel with the expansion of railway networks, stations became prominent structures with complex track layouts and gained important roles in providing train operations and traffic management. In this paper a new two-phase decision making approach is proposed for the evaluation of track layout alternatives applicable as part of the methodology for planning passenger rail stations. We propose the VIKOR method for ranking track layouts in terms of several technological criteria (railway capacity assessment, safety, and passenger-pedestrian fluctuations). The obtained distances from the theory of compromise programming are used to rank alternative layouts regarding the comprehensive technological performance In this phase of decision making, we exclude the cost criterion from the assessment procedure and incorporate it for the final phase as part of marginal analysis.
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