The Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (MOLIT) recently established the Railway Capacity Allocation Guideline (RCAG) to provide answers to questions about railway capacity allocation such as who should operate the railway service, ...
The Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (MOLIT) recently established the Railway Capacity Allocation Guideline (RCAG) to provide answers to questions about railway capacity allocation such as who should operate the railway service, who should maintain the railway tracks, when the railway plan should be initiated, and how the railway timetable should be constructed. Korea Railroad (KORAIL) has a monopoly for providing rail transportation, which meant that railway capacity allocation until the first half of 2016 involved having to resolve conflicting interests between KORAIL and KR. This hampered research into Korean railway capacity allocation. Recently, a new railway company, Suseo High-speed Railway Corporation (SHSRC), was established and has started to provide a high-speed railway service. The Korean high-speed rail market is very competitive and hence the profits of the railway service providers depend heavily on the railway capacity allocation. Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop a fair and objective railway capacity allocation procedure.
Train operation planning involves each railway company constructing its own train timetable in order to maximize its revenue. Therefore, it is highly likely that conflicts will arise between the train schedules of the different companies. The railway distributor collates the train timetables submitted by the railway companies and adjusts them so that conflicts are kept to the minimum. The aim of this study is to develop a model that can be applied to the railway capacity allocation process in Korea. The model developed here represents the railway network as a location–time network. Since an administered mechanism is used for railway capacity allocation in Korea, various requirements should be considered. In addition, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the train timetable problem.
The railway capacity distributor establishes a railway track operation plan by adjusting the train timetable requested by each railway company. If there is a conflict among the requested train schedules, the distributor attempts to resolve it using the following process. Firstly, the distributor adjusts the departure time at the station of origin for each train in order to minimize the conflict; the allowable adjustment time is typically ±5 min for passenger trains and ±30 min for freight trains. Minimizing the conflict means retaining as many feasible scheduled trains as possible in the train operation plan after adjustment by the capacity distributor. In general, the requested train schedule can only be shifted from left to right (i.e., only parallel movement of the schedule in the train graph is allowed). This rule preserves the total journey time for trains to complete their respective itineraries (known as the transit travel time). However, if an adjustment of a train’s transit travel time is needed in order to increase the feasibility of the train timetable, train overtaking is possible at stations that have sidings. When one train overtakes another, it is the train with the higher priority that does the overtaking. To prevent unrealistically excessive waiting events, we restrict the maximum waiting time during overtaking to 5 min. From the viewpoint of the capacity distributor, it makes sense to pursue the maximization of the railway access charge. In this research, we assume that the access charge for each railway section is the same. Thus, maximizing the railway access charge is equivalent to maximizing the scheduled trains after adjustment for any train conflicts. I propose a mathematical model for the train timetable problem. The optimization problem for railway capacity allocation in this paper is stated formally as follows. Firstly, set the railway network with as a set of nodes that can be stations or junctions, a detailed layout of the track at each node, and the number of tracks and the number of platforms in station . From the train timetables requested by each railway operators, given 1) the total number of trains, 2) a set of trains, 3) a set of journey sequences for train with respect to its starting location , its final destination , and the ithlocation that it passes, 4) a set of journey times for train with respect to its journey time between and , and 5) a set of commercial stops for train with respect to a commercial time at location for train . The commercial time at the starting location (or the station of origin) of train is zero. The proposed model aims to maximize the number of feasible scheduled trains by adjusting the departure time at location for train . The result of the model is the integrated timetable for railway capacity allocation.
The railway capacity allocation model that was developed during this study has three hierarchical objectives. The first is to maximize the number of feasible scheduled trains, where feasibility means that there are no conflicts among the trains. Because the first objective function counts the number of feasible scheduled trains, the model searches for the most feasible optimum solution. The second objective is to minimize the total adjustment that is required for the allocation. The model looks for the solution that requires the least amount of departure-time adjustment at the station of origin. This second objective function comes into play when two or more solutions have the same number of feasible scheduled trains. The third objective is to minimize the total delayed transit time in excessive of the requested itineraries. Clearly, this third objective function is required when two or more solutions cannot be distinguished using the first and second objectives. The model determines a suitable departure time for each train from its first station. However, there are some constraints on this choice that must be considered, such as safety time, headway, and overtaking restrictions. The model searches for the earliest departure time that satisfies each constraint at each passing station for each train.
Meta-heuristic methods such as GA, simulated annealing, and tabu search try to find a better solution by searching randomly; these methods are simple and easy to implement. A model with a nonlinear representation of the objective function and its constraints can also be solved using meta-heuristic. Meta-heuristic can find good solutions in many cases given sufficient computational time. Simulated annealing considers only neighborhood solutions, which may prohibit the diversification of solutions. Tabu search also uses the method of neighborhood searching, which does not guarantee finding good solutions. GA have been applied successfully to the train timetable problem. Therefore, GA was applied to the various objective functions and constraints of Korean railways. GA performance depends on how a solution is represented. In this work, a gene consist of a train and the number of genes in a chromosome equates to the number of trains requested by a railway company. Trains are assigned arrival and departure times at all stations in the order in which they pass through. These assignments are conducted in the order of the gene list.
GA function consists of an initial population generation, selection, crossover, mutation, and evaluation. In initial population generaton, the algorithm randomly generates the predetermined number of chromosomes. The GA attempt to form the train timetable by considering genes sequentially in a chromosome. If a train cannot be scheduled in the current timetable, it is eliminated. The total number of genes inserted after all genes have been considered defines the fitness value of the corresponding chromosome. The selection process determines which chromosomes survive into the next generation. I select two chromosomes at random and the select the fitter one; this is known as the tournament selection method. I set the selection probability of a chromosome to 80%, which is the crossover probability in this paper. The crossover process makes it possible for offspring to inherit superior genetic characteristics from their parents by combining one part of a chromosome from each parent, which is known as one-point crossover. During the mutation process, I alter the location of a randomly selected gene in a selected chromosome to increase the diversity of the population. The selected gene is then inserted at a random position in the chromosome. I set the selection probability of a gene in the mutation process to 5%, which is the mutation probability. In the evaluation process, the algorithm calculates the fitness value of the chromosomes in the newly generated population. These GA functions are executed repeatedly until the algorithm reaches the predetermined maximum number of generations.
A fictitious timetable of 388 trains was made in order to implement and solve the proposed model. I assumed that two railway companies, KORAIL and SHSRC, want to operate 258 and 130 express trains, respectively, on the Korean express railway network (KERN) during the second half of 2016. Of the 388 trains, 201 are downward and 187 are upward. Only 98 trains are feasible; each of the remaining 290 trains has a conflict (i.e., it violates one or more of constraints mentioned previously) in the test data. Author’s view is that the test data under consideration reflect the real-world scenario in which the most profitable time slots are almost the same to all railway operators, who are not motivated to negotiate unless they are forced to do so. It would appear that the most important factor affecting the uptake of railway capacity is safety time, so we chose two test scenarios: a safety time of 2 min (scenario 1) or 3 min (scenario 2). From the 388 requested trains, the GA constructed a feasible integrated train timetable for 341 trains in scenario 1 and for 303 trains in scenario 2. The results suggest that more trains could be inserted into the timetable for a shorter safety gap, which is to be expected. Of the initial 290 conflicts, the GA resolved 243 in scenario 1 and 205 in scenario 2. The two test scenarios converged to a solution within 20 iterations, which took 148 min in scenario 1 and 129 min in scenario 2. The GA converged relatively quickly with this test data. I validated the test results in two ways: a compulsory scheduling attempt, and a headway analysis. Firstly, I tried to schedule infeasible (or non-scheduled) trains compulsively, which proved impossible to do without relaxing one or more constraints in each test scenario. For the headway analysis, I calculated an average headway for feasible scheduled trains by dividing the total service (or operating) time by the number of scheduled trains. The service time was 17 h (1,020 min) per day, which resulted in average headways of 5.8 min for downward trains and 6.2 min for upward ones in scenario 1, and 6.6 min for downward trains and 6.8 min for upward ones in scenario 2. The average headway for real trains operating on the GEL is 7.2 min, which is acceptably close to what I found in analysis. Future research will include other meta-heuristic approaches to the proposed model, such as simulated annealing and tabu searching. By comparing diverse meta-heuristic methods, I expect to find a more efficient approach to the problem of railway capacity allocation. And considering diverse train type or train class might be our future study, too.