Generating Travel Plan Sets in a High-Speed Railway Network With Complex Timetables and Transfers

Abstract

Developments in high-speed railways have seen them become the mainstay of passenger transport systems in China, satisfying the increasing demand for rapid access to numerous locations. In practice, the operation of the network is a vital feature of the Chinese High-speed Railway (CHR), enabling the provision of through services while allowing indirect services via major hubs. The generation of travel plan sets in a large-scale, complex high-speed railway network is an important issue, as it is the foundation and key to those travel service systems where people can inquiry about their travel plans. This paper describes a method of generating all alternative travel plans that are potentially attractive to passengers. The inherent problem is first modeled for any journey between a given origin and destination pair, and then a spatiotemporal network is constructed. For each journey, a direct set of travel plans without transfers is extracted from the train timetable data. The construction of indirect travel plans is more complicated, and a two-stage generation method is proposed: (i) compute the $K$ -shortest paths using the improved Yen* algorithm to identify transfer node(s), and (ii) connect train services according to the train timetables. Furthermore, the reliability of a specific travel plan with transfers is determined by mapping the buffer time as a reliability measure. Finally, the proposed method is tested on the CHR network using the 2019 train timetable.