With the continuous expansion of the railway infrastructure network, the railway operation network has become more and more complex both in time and space dimensions. In order to help railway operators formulate management measures more pertinently, this research aims to develop a method to analyze the complex operation network via quantifying and ranking the importance of stations in different periods based on the train timetable. Firstly, we propose the time-space train origin-destination (OD) service network (OD-TS network) to abstractly describe the railway transportation service. And a network construction method is designed to build the OD-TS network according to the train operation information in the timetable. We further develop an improved k-shell decomposition method to quantify the node importance for the directed-weighted networks. Case studies are carried out based on the train timetable of China's high-speed railway. We study the OD-TS network from three perspectives (the global network, the railway hubs, and the stations) and analyze the spatiotemporal details of the railway operation. These analyses show that the proposed method can help the railway operators mine the spatiotemporal characteristics of the railway operation well.

Heavy-haul railway transport is a critical mode of regional bulk cargo transport. It dramatically improves the freight transport capacity of railway lines by combining several unit trains into one combined train. In order to improve the efficiency of the heavy-haul transport system and reduce the transportation cost, a critical problem involves arranging the combination scheme in the combination station (CBS) and scheduling the train timetable along the trains’ journey. With this consideration, this paper establishes two integer programming models in stages involving the train service plan problem (TSPP) model and train timetabling problem (TTP) model. The TSPP model aims to obtain a train service plan according to the freight demands by minimizing the operation cost. Based on the train service plan, the TTP model is to simultaneously schedule the combination scheme and train timetable, considering the utilization optimal for the CBS. Then, an effective hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) is designed to solve the model and obtain the combination scheme and train timetable. Finally, some experiments are implemented to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approaches and demonstrate the effectiveness of the HGA.

The “left-behind” phenomenon occurs frequently in Urban Rail Transit (URT) networks with booming travel demand, especially during peak hours in a complex URT network, which makes passenger travel patterns more complicated. This paper proposes a methodology to mine passenger travel patterns based on fare transaction records from automatic fare collection (AFC) systems and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) data from Communication Based Train Control (CBTC) Systems or tracking systems. By introducing the concept of a sequence, a space-time-sequence trajectory model is proposed to simulate a passenger’s travel activities, including when they are left-behind. The paper analyzes passenger travel trajectory links and estimates the weight of each feasible trajectory under tap-in/tap-out constraints. The station time parameters, including access/egress and transfer walking-time parameters, are important inputs for the model. The paper also presents a maximum-likelihood approach to estimate these parameters from AFC transaction data and AVL data. The methodology is applied to a case study using AFC and AVL data from the Beijing URT network during peak hours to test the proposed model and algorithm. The estimation results are consistent with the results obtained from the authorities, and this finding verifies the feasibility of our approach.

This paper aims to optimize high-speed railroad timetables for a corridor. We propose an integer programming model using a time-space network-based approach to consider passenger service demands, train scheduling, and station service demands simultaneously. A modified branch-and-price algorithm is used for the computation. This algorithm solves the linear relaxation of all nodes in a branch-and-bound tree using a column generation algorithm to derive a lower-bound value (LB) and derive an upper-bound value (UB) using a rapid branching strategy. The optimal solution is derived by iteratively updating the upper- and lower-bound values. Three acceleration strategies, namely, initial solution iteration, delayed constraints, and column removal, were designed to accelerate the computation. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm were tested using Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railroad data. The results show that the proposed model and algorithm can quickly reduce the defined cost function by 38.2% and improve the average travel speed by 10.7 km/h, which indicates that our proposed model and algorithm can effectively improve the quality of a constructed train timetable and the travel efficiency for passengers.

Nowadays, high-speed railway (HSR) has become one of the main choices for passengers. As the number of passengers increases, their travel demands become diverse and the fluctuation range of passenger travel demands will also increase. In order to adapt to the change of passenger travel demands, the switching frequency of timetables needs to be increased. When switching the timetable, the train-set circulation plan also needs to be considered. In this paper, a scheduling approach for quickly solving the timetable and the train-set circulation plan in the transition time is proposed. A section sequence is constructed in the integer programming model, and the primary train-set circulation plan is obtained. Then a stop plan is obtained on the basis of passenger travel demands. To obtain the final train-set circulation plan and the timetable, a genetic algorithm (GA) is designed, and a method that can ensure that the timetable meets the safety operation requirements is proposed. The scheduling approach is tested on the Beijing-Shanghai HSR. The results show that by extending the transition time, the scheduling approach can switch the train-set position from the old state to new state, without additional consumption of resources, on the premise of meeting the travel demands of passengers.

High-speed railways (HSRs), with their advantages of safety, energy conservation, and convenience, are increasingly becoming the preferred mode of transportation. Railway operators schedule full-schedule timetables to operate as many trains and serve as many passengers as possible. However, due to the fluctuation in passenger demands, it is not necessary to operate all trains in full-schedule timetable, which results in high operation costs and too much energy consumption. Based on this, we propose an integrated approach to schedule passenger train plans and train timetables by selecting trains to operate from the full-schedule timetable, adjusting their stopping scheme and operation sequence to reduce operation costs and energy consumption and contribute to sustainable development. In the scheduling process, both operation costs and passenger service quality are considered, and a two-objective model is established. An algorithm is designed based on Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithms-II (NSGA-II) to solve the model, containing techniques for acceleration that utilize overtaking patterns, in which overtaking chromosomes are used to illustrate the train operation sequence, and parallel computing, in which the decoding process is computed in parallel. A set of Pareto fronts are obtained to offer a diverse set of results with different operation costs and passenger service quality. The model and algorithm are verified by cases based on the Beijing–Shanghai HSR line. The results indicate that compared to the full-schedule timetable, the operation costs under three sets of passenger demands decreased by 35.4%, 27.7%, and 15.7% on average. Compared to the genetic algorithm with weighting multiple objectives and NSGA-II without acceleration techniques, the algorithm proposed in this paper with the two acceleration techniques of utilizing overtaking patterns and parallel computing can significantly accelerate the solution process, with an average reduction of 42.9% and 38.3% in calculation time, indicating that the approach can handle the integrated scheduling problem economically and efficiently.