Abstract
The need to make effective plans for locating transportation hubs is of increasing importance in the megaregional area, as recent research suggests that the growing intercity travel demand affects the efficiency of a megaregional transportation system. This paper investigates a hierarchical facility location problem in a megaregional passenger transportation network. The aim of the study is to determine the locations of hub facilities at different hierarchical levels and distribute the demands to these facilities with minimum total cost, including investment, transportation, and congestion costs. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model considering the service availability structure and hub congestion effects. A case study is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in the Wuhan metropolitan area. The results show that the congestion effects can be addressed by reallocating the demand to balance the hub utilisation or constructing new hubs to increase the network capacity. The methods of appropriately locating hubs and distributing traffic flows are proposed to optimise the megaregional passenger transportation networks, which has important implications for decision makers.
Highlights
From last century, rapid urbanisation processes have facilitated the formation of megaregions
In China, the government has released a series of policies to guide the planning of megaregional passenger transportation infrastructure in which transportation hubs are the key nodes of a megaregional passenger transportation network
This paper describes a megaregional passenger transportation system with hierarchical hub facilities
Summary
Rapid urbanisation processes have facilitated the formation of megaregions. We present a hierarchical facility location model for a megaregional passenger transportation network design with three decisions: the construction of new hubs, the closing of existing hubs, and passenger allocation decisions. This model takes into account hierarchical travel demand, multiple level hubs, and congestion effects at hubs. We propose a new service availability structure according to the relationship between intercity travel demand and hub facility service This is the first paper that studies a facility location problem based on this structure, which makes it close to the real world.
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