Operational Impacts of Using Restricted Passenger Flow Assignment in High-Speed Train Stop Scheduling Problem

One key decision basis to the train stop scheduling process is the passenger flow assignment, that is, the estimated passengers’ travel path choices from origins to destinations. Many existing assignment approaches are stochastic in nature, which causes unbalanced problems such as low efficiency in train capacity occupancy or an irrational distribution of transfer passengers among stations. The purpose of this paper is to propose a train stop scheduling approach. It combines a passenger flow assignment procedure that routes passenger travel paths freely within a train network and is particularly capable of incorporating additional restrictions on generating travel paths that better resemble the rail planner’s purpose of utilizing capacity resources by introducing four criteria to define the feasibility of travel path used by a traveler. Our approach also aims at ensuring connectivity and rapidity, the two essential characteristics of train service increasingly required by modern high-speed rails. The effectiveness of our approach is tested using the Chinese high-speed rail network as a real-world example. It works well in finding a train stop schedule of good quality whose operational indicators dominate those of an existing stochastic approach. The paper concludes with a comprehensive operational impact analysis, further demonstrating the value of our proposed approach.