Highlights A collaborative transportation plan of passengers and freight on urban rail lines. Both the dedicated freight trains and existing passenger trains to transport goods. A MILP model to jointly optimize train stopping plans and schedules. An iterative scheduling approach to solve the problem. A case study based on the UP Express in Toronto and Beijing New Airport Line.

    Abstract This paper develops an operational strategy in which urban rail transit is used for freight transport. An environment-friendly urban freight transportation alternative is analyzed by employing optimization techniques to support the collaborative transportation of passengers and freight. Practical cases are investigated to test the technical feasibility of this transportation scheme. The paper formulates the train service design problem on a single urban rail line with passenger and freight. Passenger trains have a prescribed timetable which is allowed to be slightly modified to facilitate the freight service. Freight can be transported by inserting dedicated freight trains or utilizing the extra space inside the passenger train carriages. Station platforms are able to load and unload both goods and passengers. An optimization model for combined train service design is proposed to maximize profit resulting from the balance of revenues and costs brought by the freight service. The efficient schedules of trains and freight allocation plans are to be determined. This problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model. An iterative scheduling approach which includes a pre-processing method and two heuristic iterative algorithms is designed to solve the model. Two numerical examples are introduced to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed model and the iterative scheduling approach.


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    Title :

    Urban rail service design for collaborative passenger and freight transport


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2020-12-15




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English