sustainability Article Reliability Optimization of a Railway Network Xuelei Meng 1,2,*, Yahui Wang 3, Limin Jia 2 and Lei Li 4 1 School of Traffic and Transportation, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou 730070, Gansu, China 2 State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China;
[email protected] 3 School of Foreign Languages, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou 730070, Gansu, China;
[email protected] 4 Key Laboratory of Urban Rail Transit Intelligent Operation and Maintenance Technology & Equipment of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, Zhejiang, China;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 7 October 2020; Accepted: 14 November 2020; Published: 24 November 2020 Abstract: With the increase of the railway operating mileage, the railway network is becoming more and more complicated. We expect to build more railway lines to offer the possibility to offer more high quality service for the passengers, while the investment is often limited. Therefore, it is very important to decide the pairs of cities to add new railway lines under the condition of limited construction investment in order to optimize the railway line network to maximize the reliability of the railway network to deal with the railway passenger transport task under emergency conditions. In this paper, we firstly define the reliability of the railway networks based on probability theory by analyzing three minor cases. Then we construct a reliability optimization model for the railway network to solve the problem, expecting to enhance the railway network with the limited investment. The goal is to make an optimal decision when choosing where to add new railway lines to maximize the reliability of the whole railway network, taking the construction investment as the main constraint, which is turned to the building mileage limit.