Assessment of Polish railway infrastructure and the use of artificial intelligence methods for prediction of its further development

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to analyze economic trends in rail freight volume in Poland, based on the analysis of data from the years 2009–2013, for evaluating decisions on planned investments in railway infrastructure envisioned by Poland and the EU at the time the EU was founded. The theoretical analysis presents a trend of functional Polish railways and its impact on investment decisions. In addition, it shows the long-term plans for railway transport in Poland from both the Polish government and the EU perspectives. An analysis of the current investment to support the development of railways in Poland is also elaborated. The research part of the chapter presents an analysis of statistical data on rail freight. Forecasts are precisely presented of selected transport parameters made by the Bayesian network method and Holt-Winters double exponential smoothing using an artificial immune system to determine parameters and initial conditions.