Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 6996: A Stop-Probability Approach for O-D Service Frequency on High-Speed Railway Lines (Sustainability)

Train stop planning provides appropriate service for travel demand and stations and plays a significant role in railway operation. This paper formulates stop planning from the point of view of direct travel between origin-destination (O-D) stations and proposes an analytical method to theoretically derive optimal service frequencies for O-D demand on different levels. Considering different O-D demand characteristics and train service types, we introduce the concept of stop probability to present the mathematical formulation for stop planning with the objective of minimizing per capita travel time, which is solved by an iterative algorithm combined with local search. The resulting optimal stop probabilities can be used to calculate the required service frequency for each train type serving different demand categories. Numerical examples, based on three real-life high-speed railway lines, demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. The proposed approach provides a more flexible and practical way for stop planning that explicitly takes into account the importance of different stations and passenger travel characteristics.