An Optimal Operation Planning Model for High-Speed Rail Transportation

A reasonable train operation plan for railway passenger transportation should jointly optimize the service quality and rail operator’s revenue. This paper synthesizes revenue management and train operation planning to develop an integrated model to maximize the operator’s revenue and minimize passenger’s general cost, which is applied to optimize the rail train frequencies, stopping patterns and seats’ allocation dynamically. An integer program is designed to describe this problem, which is solved by the CVX toolbox. The Chengdu–Chongqing high-speed rail line is applied to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The optimal frequencies are 95 trains per day, comparing the actual frequencies of 69 trains per day. The total profit increased by 24%, and the passengers’ waiting time reduced greatly. It can be seen that the proposed model is effective for the optimization of the rail planning, which significantly increases the total revenue and reduces the passengers’ waiting time.