Research on Optimization of High-Speed Railway Train Line Plan Oriented to Holiday Tourism Products

Abstract

With the continuous improvement in the high-speed railway (HSR) network, passengers’ holiday travel demand and the scale of tourism passenger flow have grown rapidly, placing higher requirements on HSR transportation services. Current train line plans are formulated according to regular daily passenger flow and fail to adapt to the travel demand generated by various holiday tourism products, resulting in poor adaptation to holiday passenger flow characteristics. Different from existing line-planning studies that consider only regular daily passenger flow, this paper is among the first to embed hierarchical holiday tourism products as a structural input of the HSR line planning problem and to explicitly handle asymmetric passenger demand in holiday periods. To address this gap, this paper optimizes HSR line plans based on the travel characteristics of tourism products. An integer programming model is established that allocates asymmetric passenger flows to train flows while minimizing the total operating cost. The model incorporates both conventional HSR passenger demand and the differentiated travel demand corresponding to different tourism products. A real-world experiment based on the HSR network in Jiangxi Province, China demonstrates that the proposed model effectively improves the tourism transportation efficiency and passenger flow distribution of HSR with reliable practicability. Sensitivity analyses further reveal how the tourism demand scale, the tourism sub-product diversity, and the benchmark line requirements affect the feasibility and cost of the line plan. This study provides a valid reference for the optimization of holiday train line plans and the coordinated development of tourism and transportation.