scholarly journals Estimating the Reliability of Travel Time on Railway Networks for Freight Transportation

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Safoura Salehi ◽  
Abbas Mahmoudabadi

<p><em>Railway freight transportation is an important transport system that its reliability causes economic issues. Freight carriers require predictable travel times to schedule their programs in competitive environment, so the estimation of reliability of travel time is very important. The present study proposes a travel time index that estimates the reliability of railway freight transportation and evaluates performance as well. Travel time reliability is estimated based on the shortest path between O-D pairs. Statistical measures of travel time, defining as the ratio of the 95th percentile travel time and the shortest path mean travel time as an ideal travel time, for each obtained route are calculated according to their selected links. Experimental data on Iranian rail network has been used as case study and results revealed that the routes less than 400 kilometers should be improved in terms of their reliabilities, because they are less reliable than long distance routes.</em><em></em></p>

Author(s):  
Markus Steinmaßl ◽  
Stefan Kranzinger ◽  
Karl Rehrl

Travel time reliability (TTR) indices have gained considerable attention for evaluating the quality of traffic infrastructure. Whereas TTR measures have been widely explored using data from stationary sensors with high penetration rates, there is a lack of research on calculating TTR from mobile sensors such as probe vehicle data (PVD) which is characterized by low penetration rates. PVD is a relevant data source for analyzing non-highway routes, as they are often not sufficiently covered by stationary sensors. The paper presents a methodology for analyzing TTR on (sub-)urban and rural routes with sparse PVD as the only data source that could be used by road authorities or traffic planners. Especially in the case of sparse data, spatial and temporal aggregations could have great impact, which are investigated on two levels: first, the width of time of day (TOD) intervals and second, the length of road segments. The spatial and temporal aggregation effects on travel time index (TTI) as prominent TTR measure are analyzed within an exemplary case study including three different routes. TTI patterns are calculated from data of one year grouped by different days-of-week (DOW) groups and the TOD. The case study shows that using well-chosen temporal and spatial aggregations, even with sparse PVD, an in-depth analysis of traffic patterns is possible.


2011 ◽  
Vol 97-98 ◽  
pp. 952-955
Author(s):  
Xiong Fei Zhang ◽  
Rui Min Li ◽  
Min Liu ◽  
Qi Xin Shi

Travel time reliability, as a measure of performance, is attracting more and more attention because unreliable transportation information hinders travelers’ decision making and creates difficulties for authorities to manage network operations. Since travel time reliability is closely related to the stochastic properties of the day-to-day travel time distribution, several statistical measures have been proposed, including standard deviation, coefficient of variation, buffer index, misery index and so on. Each of these measures is derived from travel time distribution but captures only one or two characteristics of travel time. In this paper, an effort is made to evaluate travel time reliability incorporating as many characteristics of travel time as possible based on fuzzy logic. The basic rules are: (1) the larger the variance is, the more unreliable the travel time is; (2) the larger the travel times of unlucky travelers are, the more unreliable the travel time is; (3) the larger the distribution skews to the left, the more unreliable the travel time is. The proposed methodology has been tested and analyzed with field data.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Tong ◽  
Lei Nie ◽  
Zhenhuan He ◽  
Huiling Fu

Train trip package transportation is an advanced form of railway freight transportation, realized by a specialized train which has fixed stations, fixed time, and fixed path. Train trip package transportation has lots of advantages, such as large volume, long distance, high speed, simple forms of organization, and high margin, so it has become the main way of railway freight transportation. This paper firstly analyzes the related factors of train trip package transportation from its organizational forms and characteristics. Then an optimization model for train trip package transportation is established to provide optimum operation schemes. The proposed model is solved by the genetic algorithm. At last, the paper tests the model on the basis of the data of 8 regions. The results show that the proposed method is feasible for solving operation scheme issues of train trip package.


Transport ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 444-462
Author(s):  
Jiaming Liu ◽  
Bin Yu ◽  
Wenxuan Shan ◽  
Baozhen Yao ◽  
Yao Sun

The yard template problem in container ports determines the assignment of space to store containers for the vessels, which could impact container truck paths. Actually, the travel time of container truck paths is uncertain. This paper considers the uncertainty from two perspectives: (1) the yard congestion in the context of yard truck interruptions, (2) the correlation among adjacent road sections (links). A mixed-integer programming model is proposed to minimize the travel time of container trucks. The reliable shortest path, which takes the correlation among links into account is firstly discussed. To settle the problem, a Shuffled Complex Evolution Approach (SCE-UA) algorithm is designed to work out the assignment of yard template, and the A* algorithm is presented to find the reliable shortest path according to the port operator’s attitude. In our case study, one yard in Dalian (China) container port is chosen to test the applicability of the model. The result shows the proposed model can save 9% of the travel time of container trucks, compared with the model without considering the correlation among adjacent links.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Ruihua Xu ◽  
Fangsheng Wang ◽  
Feng Zhou

The train operation plan plays an essential role in metro systems and directly affects transportation organization efficiency and passenger service level. In metro systems, passengers have paid more attention to the travel time reliability (TTR), reflecting the reliability of metro operation management. This article proposes an analysis method of train operation plan based on TTR in the station dimension. First, an automated fare collection (AFC) data-driven framework is established to calculate the station travel time reliability (STTR) and analyze the train operation plan at different periods. The framework structure consists of four steps: AFC data preprocessing, STTR calculation and assignment, clustering algorithm design based on SOM neural network, and train operation plan analysis and optimization. Second, the proposed method is applied to the Beijing metro network as a case study. Several promising results are analyzed that allow the optimization of the existing train operation plan. Our research shows that STTR is a good supplement for the existing metro operation assignment studies, which can help analyze and optimize the train operation plan effectively. This study is also applicable to other metro networks with AFC systems.


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