Line planning problem in a dense High-Speed Rail corridor

To satisfy the growing passenger transportation demands and improve the service quality in a railway system, a high-quality line plan needs to be designed. Line planning is an initial optimization problem in the process of railway transportation management, which includes the origin and destination (OD) of trains, routes, stop patterns and frequencies. Aiming to a optimal line plan for a dense high-speed railway corridor, this paper proposes a optimization model with objectives of minimizing passenger's total travel time and empty-seat-hour. Considering the problem is NP-hard, we introduce a novel matheuristic approach that combines metaheuristic and mathematical programming technique. Genetic algorithm (GA) is developed for providing possible combination of frequencies, and integer linear program (ILP) is applied for optimization of passenger assignment model. With integration of both, we
produce a optimal line plan with frequencies. Finally numerical experiments of Chinese case are applied to verify the proposed model and approach.