Comprehensive Decision Support Framework for Strategic Railway Capacity Planning

The potential growth of railway traffic is expected to be substantial worldwide; hence, railway companies and agencies are looking for better tools to allocate their capital investments to capacity planning in the best possible way. This paper presents a comprehensive decision support framework with three stand-alone tools for strategic railway capacity planning: (1) “Alternatives Generator,” which enumerates the possible expansion options along with their cost and capacity effects; (2) “Investment Selection Model,” which determines the portions of the network that need to be upgraded with certain capacity improvement alternatives; and (3) “Impact Analysis Module,” which evaluates the trade-off between capital investment and delay cost. This research also developed and implemented a specific decision support framework for North American class 1 railroads. On the basis of the network characteristics, estimated future demand, and available budget, this decision support framework can successfully determine t...

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