Reliable optimization of corridor capacity for China high speed railway by considering passenger service

Abstract

Railway capacity has been extensively investigated for the purpose of utilizing rail infrastructure in a possible efficient strategy. Nevertheless, the estimation of high speed rail (HSR), which is different from common railways in many aspects, is still a challenge work needed to be solved. Consequently, this work focuses on the capacity estimation of HSR corridor. The objectives and constraints are developed for the HSR with the consideration of passenger service level and buffer time uncertainty, and a two-stage optimization model is proposed. The first stage determines the optimal number of trains in terms of the passenger origin–destination demand, and the second stage is a multi-objective mixed integer programming (MO-MIP) aiming to estimate the optimal capacity usage. The branch-and-bound algorithm is extended and applied to the proposed model, and a case study is performed to Beijing–Shanghai HSR line. The optimal solution is obtained, and the sensitivity of the two objectives is analyzed.