Operation plan optimization of high-speed railway based on flexible grouping

Abstract

Whether the high-speed rail train operation plan is reasonable has an important impact on the transportation efficiency and benefits. This paper focuses on the optimization of high-speed train operation plan under the condition of unbalanced passenger flow. We formulate an integrated mixed integer linear programming model by adopting the form of flexible grouping. The model comprehensively considers constraints such as train unit allocation and passenger flow loading. It aims to minimize the number of empty seats in all trains. The inputs to the model are train units and passenger demand. The allocation of train units is completely driven by passenger demand. Taking the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway as an example, the results show that the load rate of train services is 96.42%, which is much higher than the fixed grouping. Therefore, a flexible grouping operation plan proposed in this paper can effectively improve train units' utilization and reduce enterprises' operating costs.