A Novel Model for Railway Project Selection in Network Design Problem, path based approach

Government railway agencies are faced with the problem of effectively selecting a subset of improvement and new line projects for implementation. In real, there are somealternatives for the development of each part of the network. Usual Network Design Models suppose only one project for each part. In this paper, a Railway Network Designmodel is improved to solve this problem. For solving the model we have used two main approaches, path-based and arc-based formulation, which have different characteristic. Both of models try to create a plan to select projects (different variants for new lines construction and different improvement projects for exciting lines) in the network with considering direct and indirect cost in objective function, budget constraint, and block and technical capacity constraints. To compare the features of these formulations, they are implemented and are solved for the Iranian railway network in different demand scenarios. The results reveal efficiency and effectiveness of the models.

Keywords:

railway network design problem , project selection , path-based and arcbased formulation , mixed integer programming , Iranian railway network