• Energy Research
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Railway networks have different levels of development, which affects the overall transport process and integrated sustainable development. This paper presents a methodology to assess and classify the railway network performance along the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) core network corridor. The Orient–East Med corridor (OEM) has been examined. Twenty-two infrastructural, economic and technological criteria for assessment of railway transport have been proposed. The countries were ranked used multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), by applying the Sequential Interactive Modelling for Urban Systems (SIMUS). A sensitivity analysis was performed regarding each objective, and then, their allowable range of variation was determined without modifying the whole ranking of countries. The criteria weights have been determined on the basis of the output of using the SIMUS method. It was found that the main criteria for ranking the countries are: length of the connecting railway lines of the corridor in the country, length of the railway lines in the country, number of intermodal terminals, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, passengers transport performance, freight transport performance for the railway network, corridor freight usage intensity. It was found that the railway transport in the area of the OEM corridor located in Central Europe is better developed than in the Southeast European area. A cluster analysis was performed to classify countries into groups to verify the results. The results show that the eight countries included in the OEM corridor can be classified into three groups. The methodology could be used to make decisions about transport planning and improvement of the connectivity and sustainability of the railway transport, considering their development.

The development of the transport plan must take into account various criteria impacting the transport process. The main objective of the study is to propose an integrated approach to determine the transport plan of passenger trains. The methodology consists of five steps. In the first step, the criteria for optimization of the transport plan were defined. In the second step, variants of the transport plan were formulated. In the third step, the weights of the criteria are determined by applying the step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis method (SWARA) multi-criteria method. The multi-objective optimization was conducted in the fourth step. The following multi-objective optimization approaches were used and compared: weighted sum method (WSM), compromise programming method (CP), and the epsilon–constraint method (EC). The study proposes a modified epsilon–constraint method (MEC) by applying normalization of each objective function according to the maximal value of the solution by individual optimization for each objective function, and hybrid methods: hybrid WSM and EC, hybrid WSM and MEC, hybrid CP and EC, and Hybrid CP and MEC. The impact of the variation of passenger flows on the choice of an optimal transport plan was studied in the fifth step. The Laplace’s criterion, Hurwitz’s criterion, and Savage’s criterion were applied to come to a decision. The approbation of the methodology was demonstrated through the case study of Bulgaria’s railway network. Suitable variant of transport plan is proposed.

This study is useful for railway operators as it enables them to verify their decisions against the results of the application of the techniques of strategic planning and multi-criteria analysis. It gives railway stakeholders concise, objective and unbiased information so that they can then make decisions and also allows them to determine the strengths and sensitivity, of the best solution found. This paper presents a methodology for the assessment of the policies of railway operators using Strengths–Weakness–Opportunities–Threats (SWOT) criteria and the Sequential Interactive Modelling for Urban Systems (SIMUS) method. The methodology of the research consists of two stages. In the first stage, the alternatives of the policies for the railway operator are formulated; the criteria in the SWOT group are defined; and the values of the criteria are determined for each of the alternatives. In the second stage, the SIMUS method is applied to rank the alternatives and assess the criteria in the SWOT groups. The criteria are interpreted as objectives and linear optimizations are performed. A comparison between the desired values for each objective of the SWOT criteria and the optimum values of the objective functions obtained by SIMUS was made. The methodology was applied to the Bulgarian railway network. Three policies for railway operation were studied. The total number of 17 railway policies criteria in the SWOT group were defined and assessed—three strengths criteria, seven weaknesses criteria, three opportunities criteria and four threats criteria. The results indicated that the best strategy is A3 (some reconstruction of the railway infrastructure and new rolling stock on some lines), with the highest score of 3.76, followed by A2 (new rolling stock on some lines), with a score of 2.71. The status-quo strategy (A1) has a very low score of 0.43, that the current situation or status-quo cannot be supported. The weights of both strengths and opportunities are both of the same importance with a weight of 0.180. It was found out that the clusters Weakness and Threats are dominant with weights of 0.4 and 0.24 respectively. The results show that the weights are all practically the same, about 0.06, and therefore, no discrimination by importance is possible. The methodology makes it possible to consider the alternatives simultaneously, and in this way, the results will reflect the effect of one criterion on all others, and permit us to quantify the differences between expected and real results.