Optimization for Stop Plan of Passenger‐Like Container Train with Container Distributions and Train Utilization Rates

Abstract

The railway container transportation is attracting more and more attention in China. In order to improve the service quality, a novel concept of passenger-like container train is proposed, which can reduce the accumulation time of containers at the origin station and increase the train frequency compared with the traditional container through train. With the aim of generating optimal operation strategies for passenger-like container trains, this paper establishes an optimization model for the train stop plan problem, in which the objective is to minimize the total number of stops. In addition, the specific container-to-train distribution and the utilization rate of each individual train are considered. The proposed model is a mixed-integer linear programming one, which can be solved by using the CPLEX solver. Finally, the numerical experiments are performed to test the effectiveness of our model by using a simple railway line and the China Railway Express corridor as examples. The results prove the advantages of our method.

Integrated optimization of train stop planning and ticket pricing with equity concerns of passengers for high-speed railways

“…However, given that train stop planning can complicate the line-planning problem, many researchers have studied it as an independent problem for a given train set and train type. Xia et al 4 adopted a passenger transportation-like organization strategy for railway container transportation and studied the incurred stop planning problem accordingly.…”

“…For example, the ticket price for OD pair (1,2) can range from 20 to 60 yuan. The travel cost of the competing transportation mode is assumed to be 300 min for OD pair (1, 2), (2,3) and (3,4), 400 min for OD pair (1,3) and (2,4), and 500 min for OD pair (1,4), respectively. Both e v and e h range from 1.0 to 3.0.…”

“…To show the detailed passenger-to-assignment, an outer rectangle is used to characterize the train OD and (1,4) can travel by this train; second, the price for train T1 is 180 yuan, which is beyond the maximum affordable prices of the medium-and low-income passengers and accordingly, causes them to choose other trains. Furthermore, it can be observed that no passenger group is excluded from the HSR service because of the scientifically determined ticket prices.…”

“…In this study, the equity performance is evaluated based on the average travel cost of different passenger groups. In this subsection, we track the travel cost of passengers in OD pairs (2,4) under the required total number of train stops of 12 and 14, respectively.…”