Track allocation optimization in high-speed railway stations from infrastructure management and service perspectives

Background: The high-speed railway has been developed rapidly, making track allocation optimization in high-speed railway stations one of the most important problems for traffic control. Methods: This paper proposes a 0-1 nonlinear integer programming model from both infrastructure management and service perspectives to solve this problem at the tactical level. The goal is to balance the track occupation time and at the same time to minimize the total walking distance between the entrance hall and the platforms for all passengers. A pre-calculation technique of time points considering the preparation of the route and a line group method are firstly studied. In order to solve the programming, the simulated annealing algorithm is applied. Results: A case of a China high-speed railway station is used to verify the effectiveness of this model. The optimized result is much better than the original plan in some key indicators. A comparison between the proposed algorithm and an accurate method, the branch-and-bound, is demonstrated. The simulated annealing algorithm obtains almost the same result as the accurate method in a much shorter time. Conclusions: The proposed model is practicable for the the high-speed railway stations.