Railway Operations Models

This chapter is intended as an exposure to OR based methods, particularly the analytical approach to modelling railway operations. An overview of several planned operations in railway transportation is provided in an academic context. Some of the applications and the associated models are applied in realistic settings in the transportation industry, and also have demonstrated evidence of acceptance over a long number of years. Primary coverage is on transportation scheduling and the concise discussions are on planning phases, various operations that can be deterministically modeled and analysed, model development, few exercises and real-world stories, wherever appropriate. All sections are adequately provided with the list of references and an interested reader can benefit from a conceptual understanding to model development and to implement and deploy, under some prior knowledge on the basics and programming experience.

Linkage Between Regional Accessibillity, Economic Development, and Logistic Infrastructure

This chapter reviews regional accessibility and relationship between regional accessibility, the logistic infrastructure and regional economic development. The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the complexity and causality of this relationship. Transport infrastructure is an important policy instrument to promote regional economic development. In addition, development of logistics is a very important part of the transport policy, while accessibility is an important determinant of the attractiveness of regions for logistics activities. Accessibility indicators measure the benefits households and firms in a region enjoy from the existence and use of the transport infrastructure. Economic development may determine transportation needs and lead to infrastructure improvements and accessibility. The theoretically is defined and empirical evidence that transport accessibility suggests that there is a link between the accessibility of the region and its competitiveness and, therefore, regional economic growth.

Understanding Accessibility

Accessibility measures are generally concerned with equity and a better distribution of services in a territory and can be accepted as key variables for supporting supply/demand, location/allocation and service/catchment area related planning policies and strategies at national, regional, and local levels. Since accessibility measures need organization of huge and complex spatial data sets, accessibility modeling often lends itself to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for analysis and presentation. Since numerous accessibility measures and modeling techniques ranging from simple to sophisticated can be found in the literature, this work aim to provide an overview of the theoretical framework and relevant background about GIS-based accessibility modeling process. The results could provide a significant support for the decision makers who are supposed to deal with transportation planning, accessibility modeling, location/allocation and service/catchment area related issues.

Solving Solid Transportation Problems With Multi-Choice Cost and Stochastic Supply and Demand

In this chapter, the authors propose a new approach to analyze the Solid Transportation Problem (STP). This new approach considers the multi-choice programming into the cost coefficients of objective function and stochastic programming, which is incorporated in three constraints, namely sources, destinations, and capacities constraints, followed by Cauchy's distribution for solid transportation problem. The multi-choice programming and stochastic programming are combined into a solid transportation problem, and this new problem is called Multi-Choice Stochastic Solid Transportation Problem (MCSSTP). The solution concepts behind the MCSSTP are based on a new transformation technique that will select an appropriate choice from a set of multi-choice, which optimize the objective function. The stochastic constraints of STP converts into deterministic constraints by stochastic programming approach. Finally, the authors construct a non-linear programming problem for MCSSTP, and by solving it, they derive an optimal solution of the specified problem. A realistic example on STP is considered to illustrate the methodology.

Sustainable Parking Planning for Smart Growth of Metropolitan Cities

This chapter identifies main problems of parking planning in demand-oriented conventional paradigm. Parking planning principles and cost-effective programs in supply-oriented sustainable paradigm are presented in the chapter listing many economic, social and environmental benefits. The chapter describes various parking strategies for developing a sustainable parking plan for smart growth of metropolitan cities, including cases of Istanbul and Vienna. A critical perspective is drawn for the parking planning policies for these city cases. Parking is recognized as an important factor influencing accessibility. Parking planning, parking policies and pricing play a critical role in local government decision making.

Modeling the Change of Urban Spatial Structure: Use Interzonal Travel Data to Estimate Urban Growth and Expansion by Hierarchical Cluster Analyses

The Urban spatial structure is affected by spatial interactions among various activity locations, and land uses in the city over the transportation system. Each city has its unique circulation pattern of passengers and freight due to its unique geographic conditions and the distribution of locations of economic activities. In that sense, it is claimed in this chapter per the authors that urban spatial structure can be modeled using interzonal (O/D) travel data. Thus, the chapter presents a case study of modeling spatial structures developed by employing Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) using travel pattern data for current and future scenarios. As a result, urban growth and expansion were estimated based on the level of interaction (represented by distance or similarity modeled based on trip interchanges) over the transportation system in terms of population and/or employment increases. The interaction was described by a measure of distance or similarity, modeled with respect to trip interchanges.

Identifying the Temporal Characteristics of Intra-City Movement Using Taxi Geo-Location Data

In this chapter, the authors focus on temporal patterns of urban taxi trips and explore determinant factors in conjunction with geodatabase at aggregate level. Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial model is proposed in light of count data nature and excessive number of O-D pairs with zero trip. Three typical time slots on weekdays, as well as weekends, are introduced as case study to check temporal variations of intra-city movement. The results indicate that trip distance, land use, socioeconomics, and built environment are significant variables that affect the number of taxi trips between two locations. In particular, longer travel and worse economy conditions, such as low employment and average annual income and more population under poverty, may prevent more movements, which have more impacts during peak hours. A better transit system may reduce the taxi trips, except for areas with more subway stations. Develpoed area for instance more commercial or residential area is more likely to attract more visits by taxis, as well as dense public facilities but with more temporal variations.

Modeling Carrier Interactions in an International Freight Transport System

This paper presents a novel multi-level hierarchical approach which models carrier interactions in international maritime freight transportation networks. Ocean carriers, land carriers and port terminal operators are considered. Port terminal operators, providing transportation services within a port complex, are regarded as a special type of the carrier, based on their behavior. The carriers make pricing and routing decisions at different parts of the multimodal network, having hierarchical relationships. Ocean carriers are regarded as the leaders in a maritime shipping market. Port terminal operators are the followers of ocean carriers as well as the leaders of land carriers. The individual carrier problem is formulated at each level using Nash equilibrium to find the optimal service charge and routing pattern for which each carrier obtains the greatest profit. Interactions among different types of carriers are captured in a three-level model. The concept of multi-leader-follower game is applied to a multi-level game. A numerical example is used to demonstrate the validity of the developed three-level model.

Benefits Forgone

By conservative, reliable, objective, and preliminary estimates, the United States could generate at least $660 million annually – $26.4 billion over four decades – by building and operating faster, more frequent, more dependable, and more highly integrated passenger rail service in four corridors: The Northeast; the Chicago Hub; California; and the Northwest. Numerous studies by a variety of national and international organizations and government agencies suggest that the actual cost of building and/or improving passenger rail service lines is significantly less than the cost per mile of other modal alternatives. In fact, in many corridors, passenger rail is the only feasible option for adding capacity, given the practical constraints facing aviation and highway expansion. Further, by integrating improved, higher speed intercity passenger rail service into the existing transportation system, major issues of congestion, mobility and economic inequality can be addressed.

Intelligent Transportation Systems

“Intelligent Transportation systems” is what everyone wants to know about, and about which very little is available as know-how. ITS technologies and monitoring systems are quite popular and reasonably well deployed in developed countries, particularly the roadways and airways. ITS holds a greater promise than ever before, as both availability of niche technologies and demand for more efficient transportation systems have increased multi-fold in recent years. Of late, there are huge railway projects all over the world that spans through several techniques, such as light / heavy rails, monorails etc. Apart from the social benefits that can be envisaged, these projects are genuine examples of public-private partnerships along with global business operations. Many of these projects demonstrate a classy trend of moving towards automation of operations of very large scales. Few agent architectures are discussed in brief in this chapter.