Work

Multi-period railway line planning for integrated passenger-freight transportation

Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper addresses a multi-period line planning problem in an integrated passenger-freight railway system, aiming to maximize profit while serving passengers and freight using a combination of dedicated passenger trains, dedicated freight trains, and mixed trains. To accommodate demand with different time sensitivities, we develop a period-extended change&go-network that tracks the paths taken by passengers and freight. The problem is formulated as a path-based mixed integer programming model, with the linear relaxation solved using column generation. Paths for passengers and freight are dynamically generated by solving pricing problems defined as elementary shortest-path problems with duration constraints. We propose two heuristic approaches: price-and-branch and a diving heuristic, with acceleration strategies, to find integer feasible solutions efficiently. Computational experiments on the Chinese high-speed railway network demonstrate that the diving heuristic outperforms the price-and-branch heuristic in both computational time and solution quality. Additionally, the experiments highlight the benefits of integrating freight, the advantages of multi-period line planning, and the impact of different demand patterns on line operations.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4403664093
Cites:
Cited by: 1
Related to: 10