Optimizing Station Locations and their Connection Sequence Along Rail Transit Lines through a Bilevel Approach

摘要

A conceptual framework to design a rail transit alignment is presented in this study. Two veryimportant components of a rail transit alignment are the station locations and sequence in whichthey are connected. A bilevel programming model is developed to optimize the above mentionedtwo components simultaneously for planning of the alignment of a rail transit line. The stationlocations are optimized by minimizing the total cost in the lower level and the length of thetransit line is minimized by optimizing the sequence of the stations in the upper level. A GeneticAlgorithm-based optimization algorithm is developed to optimize each objective function at thelower and upper levels. The model is applied in a hypothetical example around Washington, DCarea. The tentative alignment of the transit line is obtained as the optimal locations and sequenceof stations are determined. The geometric design details of the railtrack alignment can beintegrated to the modeling framework under a future scope of research.