Imitation forecast of railway system operation in a macroregion

The article describes an analytical and information system that was used for forecasting the operation parameters of the railway system in a macroregion of Russia - the Far North. Its economy is focused on the extraction and processing of hydrocarbons, metal production, construction materials, and generate large volumes of exports and inter-regional cargo flows. The region covers an expansive territory and is characterized by harsh weather, an extreme environment, and uneven development of the transportation network. Research into the transportation issues of economic development in such areas presents a challenging task because the region is unique, statistical data are incomplete and classified; there is a hierarchy of businesses and organizations operating in the region that have their own goals and objectives and compete against its other; the region is plagued with social and environmental problems and a lack of administrative integration between individual districts. Using rigorous mathematical tools for assessing transportation infrastructure projects under such conditions is only limited to finding solutions to stand-alone problems and scenario comparison. A model of the applied system that is outlined in the article makes it possible to analyze specific projects of regional railway system development that take into account strategic priorities and goals of the state, social and economic development problems experienced by the neighboring regions, the oil and gas sector and major employers, as well as corporate goals of the sustainable development of railway companies. The application of the model over an extended period of time showed that the analysis of the structure of cargo flows and customers bound to junctions of the transportation network makes it possible to suggest what aspects of the railway infrastructure should be reorganized in line with the development dynamics of economic entities that consume transportation services. The study is built upon a number of projects that were implemented in the north of Tyumen Region and the Yamal- Nenets and Khanty-Mansi autonomous areas of Russia. © 2018 WIT Press.ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The work was supported by Act 211 Government of the Russian Federation, contract № 02.A03.21.0006

Spatiotemporal vulnerability analysis of railway system

This paper aims to develop a comprehensive framework to analyze the spatiotemporal vulnerability of railway systems assessed by passengers delay under disruptions and the framework integrates the time-related attributes of disruptions, railway system, and heterogeneous train flows. In the framework, the modeling of the railway system involves a two-layer network structure consisting of physical layer and service layer. The proposed framework introduces the concept of component damage scenario to represent the post-disruption state of railway component. Combination of the component damage scenarios can represent the system damage status under any kinds of disruptions. This study applies the proposed framework to the Chinese high-speed railway system and analyzes its spatiotemporal vulnerability under two types of disruptions: individual station failure and spatially localized failures. The finding of this study facilitate the design of system maintenance strategies to mitigate system vulnerability under various disruptions

An iterative approach for reducing the impact of infrastructure maintenance on the performance of railway systems

Planned infrastructure works reduce the available capacity of a railway system and make it more vulnerable to conflicts and delay propagation. The starting point of this paper is a published timetable that needs to be adapted due to the temporary unavailability of some resources. Since the timetable is in operation, changed arrival or departure times and cancelations have an impact on the passengers who need to adapt their travel behavior. In the light of passenger service, a trade-off is made between these inconveniences and the delays that occur in practice due to the reduced capacity. Taking the robustness of the adapted railway timetable into account is a new approach to rescheduling in case of a planned infrastructure unavailability. In this paper, an algorithm that adjusts the train routing and the train schedule to the planned maintenance interventions and keeps the level of passenger service as high as possible is presented. To avoid large inconveniences, the developed algorithm tries to minimize the number of cancelations. Computational results show that by allowing small modifications to the routing and the timetable, the robustness of the resulting solution can improve by more than 10 percent and only few trains need to be canceled.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: An iterative approach for reducing the impact of infrastructure maintenance on the performance of railway systems journaltitle: European Journal of Operational Research articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2015.12.037 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.status: publishe