A new approach to identify and resolve capacity bottlenecks in railway networks (Case Study: Iranian Railway Network)

The aim of this study is to propose a novel method to identify the bottlenecks in the railway networks. This method is based on two different approach. In the first approach, a new algorithm is proposed, aimed to incrementally assign the freight demands to the network. The specific novelty of this approach is the consideration of the railway capacity during the assignment process. By employing this approach, the critical bottlenecks of the railway networks can be identified. A second approach aims to determine the relative priorities of the bottlenecks and proposed to resolve them. In this approach, the method all or nothing assignment (Regardless capacity Blocks) is used to determine the load flow in different parts of the railway network. In order to prioritize the capacity bottlenecks the index titled "bottleneck intensity" is presented. The index indicates the potential load demand in the difference origins-destination. To evaluate the proposed method in this study, Iranian railway network examined. All demand and network capacity data were collected and using the proposed method capacity bottlenecks were identified and Prioritization.
The results of this study showed that the solution to increase the capacity in 10 first critical bottleneck absorbed potential demand equal 4.7 million tons in the railway network.