مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله امگا – Omega

برنامه ریزی توقف قطار، برنامه ریزی قطار، بهینه سازی مشارکتی، قطار سریع السیر

With the development of social economy, a large scale of highspeed railways have been put into operation or been being under construction in some countries to meet large passenger flow demands. Thus, effectively managing and operating the high-speed railways then becomes an important issue for the different railway companies. On the high-speed railway corridors, train stop planning and train scheduling, which are regarded as the most important parts of train operations and managements, have often been studied separately up to now due to the complexity of each involved problem. In practice, as a sub-problem of the train operating managements, the train stop plan is usually made on the basis of predictions of the potential passenger flow for different origin–destination pairs, and the generated stop plan needs to be adjusted repeatedly in order to satisfy the realistically changing requirements over the service time horizon. With the specified stop plan design, the scheduling process then aims to determine the arrival and departure times at each predetermined service station such that no operational conflicts occur between different trains, and expectedly, the resource utilization of the railway traffic system can be maximized. Typically, in comparison to the train stop plan, a train schedule can provide more detailed operational instructions for all the involved trains on the tactic level-based decision strategies.

In general, train stop planning and train scheduling are usually included in different pre-trip planning stages. For clarity, Lusby et al. [36] gave a detailed flowchart to show the railway planning process, as shown in Fig. 1. In this process, once a pre-specified train stop plan is changed according to the realistic requirements (for instance, busy transport during the Spring Festival in China), a new train schedule on the railway needs to be regenerated to satisfy the varied stop plan constraints. Obviously, this process essentially increases the complexity of railway operations. Aiming to produce a comprehensive operational plan on the tactic levels, we are particularly interested in how to design effective methods to collaboratively optimize these two problems, and then generate a system-optimization based planning strategy. Since this topic still has not attracted sufficient attention in the literature, we hereinafter shall address this issue formally.

۱٫۱٫ Literature review Practically, the line planning and train scheduling are two significant parts for determining a detailed train operation plan. In the stage of line planning, one needs to specify the number of trains, type of trains, the stop plan for each train, etc., which is usually included in the strategic level-based decision making. In this process, the train stop planning is of particular importance for the real-world operations once the number and type of trains are provided. For this problem, the main task is to determine the stopping stations for each train on railway lines to satisfy the passenger demands with the minimum cost. In the literature, five kinds of train stop plans are often be considered in reality, including the all-stop operation, skip-stop operation, zonal operation, express/local operation and combined stop operation. Each type of these stop plans has its own advantages, disadvantages and applicable conditions. Typically, although the allstop operation is obviously the simplest stop planning for satisfying all passenger demands, it might probably enhance the total travel time of long-distance passengers. With this concern, Vuchic [45] further considered the skip-stop operation, zonal operation and express/local operation, and gave evaluation methods of using these stop strategies by summarizing, analyzing and comparing each of them. Zolfaghari et al. [56] pointed out that although stop skipping can effectively reduce the waiting times for passengers on boarding a vehicle and those at downstream stops, it still might increase the waiting time for passengers at skipped stops and those who are requested by the driver to alight at a given stop to wait for the next vehicle in service. According to the operating experience of Japanese Shinkansen, Lan [30] proposed that in designing operation plans of Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway, staggered stop plan, direct and other forms of stops programs should be taken into account. In addition, Cheng and Peng [6] considered the combined stop plan with elastic demands. The computational results showed that the combined stop plan is more suitable for some special passenger flow.