China's Railway Transportation Safety Regulation System Based on Evolutionary Game Theory and System Dynamics

Abstract

China's railways were restructured in 2013. The number of regulatory practitioners has decreased significantly, making real-time regulation more difficult. Regulatory transfers from inside to outside the railway industry increases information risks. A more reasonable regulation mechanism is needed. The article considers introducing a public supervision mechanism into the railway transportation safety regulation system, which includes two regulators and one regulatee. As the government regulator, the State Railway Administration (SRA) regulates the safety of China Railway Corporation (CR) and encourages the public to act as supervisors to expose the CR's unsafe production information. To analyze the risks and effectiveness of the system, a multiplayer evolutionary game and system dynamics-based model for railway transportation safety regulation is established. The decision processes of players under different conditions are simulated. The results show that improving the public supervision ratio is conducive to improve the CR's safe production ratio. However, there is no evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) in the system. Strategies and evolutionary processes have large fluctuations, which represent high risk. Excessive penalty and reward coefficients can aggravate the amplitude and frequency of fluctuations, causing uncertainty in regulation and making it more difficult to control the actual problems. A dynamic reward and punishment mechanism is proposed to control these fluctuations. The system finally achieves an ESS that results in the lowest regulation investment for the SRA, a safe production ratio for the CR of 95%, and a public supervision ratio of 95.2%. Introducing public supervision and dynamic reward and punishment mechanisms help to stabilize and improve the CR's safe production ratio and to decrease the SRA's regulatory investment.

Evaluation of the Quality Supervision System for Construction Projects in China Considering the Quality Behavior Risk Transmission

“…It is generally acknowledged by scholars that the government increasing the number of penalties or rewards is an effective measure to control illegal behavior during construction [9,10,20]. In this section, the penalty and the reward will be changed respectively to investigate the influence of the changes on the multi-player game.…”

“…Many research trials have proven that relating the penalty and reward to the actions of the players can effectively control the fluctuations in the evolutionary game [10,27,28]. This article attempts to introduce a dynamic penalty and incentive mechanism, including a dynamic penalty and dynamic reward.…”

“…One argument has pointed out that the government should improve the intensity of the government supervision to reduce illegal quality behavior during construction [9]. However, others have expressed their disagreement that the government supervision neither has enough supervisors or funding nor follows the market mechanism, and thus, is ineffective as an external constraint means [8,10,11]. The main reason for the ineffective quality supervision system in China is that the different interests of the government and the participants often give rise to conflicts.…”

“…Thus, a collection of penalty and reward has been put forward to curb the illegal quality behavior. Different combinations of penalty and reward mechanisms have been successfully applied to many areas, such as coal-mine safety regulation [14,20] and railway transportation safety regulation [10].…”

Tripartite Evolution Game of Railway Safety Supervision Under the Influence of Collusion Within the Enterprise

“…In view of the entrusted transportation management mode of China's highspeed railway, Li et al [14] established an evolutionary game model and carried out the system dynamics simulation, in which the game players are composed of three parties: the high-speed railway company, the National Railway Administration and the entrusted railway administration. Feng et al [15] introduced two regulatory agencies and one regulatory agency into the railway transportation safety supervision system, established a railway transportation safety supervision model based on the multi-system evolutionary game and system dynamics, and simulated the decision-making process of players under different conditions.…”