A Bi-Level Passenger Preference-Oriented Line Planning Model for High-Speed Railway Operations

Abstract

To solve bottlenecks and capacity shortages in railway corridors, it is necessary to consider passengers’ temporal-spatial preferences in conjunction with train dispatching decisions at the line planning stage. A design of the departure and stop plans which is based on the passengers’ preferences would guarantee a high quality of service. This paper presents a line planning optimization model for high-speed railway (HSR) operations that addresses both the operating costs of lines and passengers’ preferences through a bi-level integer programming (IP) problem. Using actual travel data from the Shenzhen–Changsha HSR in China, we investigate passengers’ travel behavior during different time periods and between several origin and destination (OD) pairs to characterize their spatial-temporal preferences. An IP model is then developed that maximizes the degree of passenger departure time satisfaction (DTS) at the higher level and the operating costs of lines at the lower level. Due to the complexity of the problem, a methodology is proposed to find a conflict-free solution for the proposed model to find train frequencies in each block and their stop plans at each station between the upper- and lower-level models. It is shown that a given passenger trip demand between an origin and a destination could become more flexible by analyzing its time characteristics and the DTS. Finally, a case study is presented to show the effectiveness of the model and the solution approach.