Analyzing the Railway Network of the Belt and Road Initiative

Rail freight has exhibited significant growth within the last decade between Asia and Europe, especially after the announcement of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, which consists of seaborne and land routes. Within the latter one, this paper focuses on the railroad network that consists of six major corridors. Using the software AnyLogic (Version 8), we give a macroscopic model designed as a GIS-based discrete-event model of rail freight from China to Germany under existing border control point capacities, eventually providing a general overview toward the classification of different routes and countries and later ranking them according to their criticality index. This criticality index is computed as a product of time variance and the Logistics Performance Index. The former is obtained through various scenario analyses within the paradigm of shortest route and current border control points having constant capacity, but variable number of trains per day. In an attempt to understand the network under stress, the results obtained from this study also establish the need to increase the processing capacity at border control points to maximize the utilizability of this transcontinental railway network. The results show that lower capacity at border control points leads to higher time for trains to reach their destination. Stakeholders who are actively seeking to expand their Belt and Road Initiative investment or using rail transportation may understand when the network would reach peak performance and what measures could help to accomplish its maximum efficiency.