Multicriteria Evaluation of Transport Plan for High-Speed Rail: An Application to Beijing-Xiongan

Abstract

Beijing has an enormous transportation challenge: to relieve the extreme congestion that has arisen, largely due to overpopulation. To meet this challenge, the city administration has decided to extend its territory; a new city will be planned and built. This new city, Xiongan, will reduce the burden on the capital. A new high-speed railway (HSR) line is designed to transport millions of people every day within less than an hour. This study applies the potential of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and multicriteria methods, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE II), to determine the best alternative of transportation for the new high-speed railway line between Beijing and Xiongan, comparing different ones. The methodology consists of two stages. In the first stage remote sensing datasets such as ASTER DEM and LANDSAT images and GIS software such as ERDAS IMAGINE and ArcGIS have been used to determine settlement distribution, station location, elevation model, slope percentage, vegetation percentage, and route alignment for a new high-speed railway line for better understanding of its spatial distribution pattern over the study area. The second phase of the study focusing on assessing the various alternatives of transportation has been determined, and three approaches to choosing the best alternative have been introduced. In the paper we examine criteria associated with travel and economic criteria: travel time, the number of train stops, public satisfaction with transport, the number of seats per day, connectivity, operating costs, profit, and the payback period. Six alternatives of transportation have been studied. The stops in Guan and stations in the metro’s rings have been investigated. In the second stage, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and PROMETHEE II methods have been used to select the best alternative. The first approach uses only criteria related to the trip, as the criterion to choose the best alternative is the maximum of the net outranking flows by PROMETHEE II method; the second approach applies two independent criteria: the ratio of normalized operating costs and the normalized net outranking flows, and the ratio of the normalized payback period and the normalized net outranking flows; the third approach includes all defined criteria, and the criterion of choosing the best alternative is the maximum of net outranking flows as calculated by the PROMETHEE II method. The approaches have been analyzed with the purpose of comparing the results. The result indicates that it is expedient to have a station in Guan, which will increase the connection and connectivity among the cities while providing fast mobility options for a large number of inhabitants of Guan city. Furthermore, the result from Remote Sensing and GIS analysis demonstrates that the proposed high-speed railway line will be environmentally sustainable and is economically/socially feasible and that it will certainly attract current and future passengers because of their needs.

Evaluation Criteria of Smart City Mobility System Using MCDM Method

“…In the scientific articles, researchers (Broniewicz & Ogrodnik, 2020;Deluka-Tibljaš, Karleuša, & Dragičević, 2013;Erdogan & Kaya, 2019;Mardani, Zavadskas, Khalifah, Jusoh, & MD Nor, 2016) examine the popularity of MCDM methods within the projects associated with transport infrastructure. Based on the literature, it can be stated that the AHP method is one of the most popular, it is used to determine the importance coefficients of smart mobility system indicators (Broniewicz & Ogrodnik, 2020;Boselli et al, 2015;Castillo & Pitfield, 2010;Deluka-Tibljaš et al, 2013, Erdogan & Kaya, 2019Farooq et al, 2019;Podvezko, Sivilevicius, & Podviezko, 2014). The AHP is a powerful tool of multicriteria decision-making developed by Saaty (1980).…”

“…However, increase in transport supply is often accompanied by undesirable results. Cities are facing challenges such as traffic jams, rising property prices, environmental pollution, overpopulation and reliance on private vehicles (Farooq, Xie, Stoilova, & Ahmad, 2019). While the world population is increasing, it is declining in the Baltic States.…”

Discussion on the Importance of Combination with Railway Route Selection and Urban Planning

“…The railway freight stations and freight yards closely related to production and life were arranged in the suburban areas or storage areas; some special railway lines of heavy industry enterprises are arranged around the enterprises. From the perspective of the city scale and planning concept at that time, this layout is reasonable and effective [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. After the reform and opening up, with the rapid development of China's economy, the siphon effect of cities, especially mega cities and regional central cities on the surrounding areas is more and more strong, resulting in the continuous expansion of urban population and scale, so that the original stations and special railway lines located in the outskirts of the city or around enterprises will cut the urban land into multiple blocks, seriously affecting the urban development.…”

Construction of Consistent Comparison Matrix by Macharis’ Method Revisit

“…However, they did not apply the construction proposed by Macharis et al [1] such that they will not face the problem of changing entries of a consistent matrix by experts. We will not list all of them in the following, but only mention three of them: Çalişkan et al [10], Farooq et al [11], and Jamshidi et al [12].…”