A Line Planning Optimization Model for High-Speed Railway Network Merging Newly-Built Railway Lines

Abstract

This paper is devoted to developing a line-planning approach for high-speed railway networks merging newly built railway lines, which result in the change of the network’s original structure and some passengers’ travel routes. In order to exactly describe the choice of time-varying passengers and the operation of the trains, a passenger travel network with time information is constructed based on the pre-generated candidate train set. Following this, a line-planning optimization model for optimizing trains on both the existing railway network and the merged new railway line is established under the considered constraints, such as transportation resources on the network. It does not aim to only provide higher service level for passengers and increase revenue of railway enterprise, but also to ensure the continuity of the existing trains to facilitates passengers and train organization. A framework of the Simulated Annealing Algorithm is designed to solve the proposed model by combining the neighboring solution search strategies with evaluation method based on the allocation of passengers. The case of a partial high-speed railway network in China is studied to test the practicability and validity of the proposed approach.