Railway Alignment Optimization in Mountainous Regions Considering Spatial Geological Hazards: A Sustainable Safety Perspective

Abstract

Sustainable railway construction and operation are threatened by densely occurring geological hazards in complex mountainous regions. Thus, during the alignment optimization process, it is vital to reduce the harmful impacts of geological hazards to a railway. However, current alignment-related studies solely consider such threats in existing geological hazard regions and, outside these regions, slight attention has been devoted to the assessment of potential hazardous impacts along the alignment. To this end, this paper proposes a novel railway alignment optimization model considering both existing and potential geological hazards based on quantitative geological hazard evaluation criteria from a sustainable safety perspective. More specifically, a geohazard zone classification method, within which an energy–slope model is integrated, is first developed. Three geohazard regions, namely the geohazard outbreak region, buffer region and fuzzy region, can then be obtained. Afterward, a spatial geological hazard assessment model is constructed considering the geological danger of three kinds of geohazards (debris flows, landslides and rockfalls) and railway construction vulnerability. This model is incorporated into a previous cost–hazard bi-objective alignment optimization model. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model is verified by applying it to a real-life case of the Sichuan–Tibet railway. The results show that this method can effectively optimize mountain railway alignments by concurrently reducing geological hazards and costs, which is beneficial to railway safety and sustainable construction and operation.

Mountain railway alignment optimization based on landform recognition and presetting of dominating structures

“…At present, there are only few specialized studies considering geo-hazard risk in the alignment optimization realm. Therefore, a geo-hazard risk value F H proposed in Pu et al (2021) is employed here as the geologic influencing factor. F H is assigned to each grid in railway-reachable ranges and its value in every grid cell traversed by a dominating structure can be accumulated to form the total geo-hazard risk value (F TH ) for this structure:…”

“…Besides, the geologic conditions should also be considered in mountainous regions with widely distributed geologic hazards. According to Pu et al (2021), a geologic hazard value F H is assigned to every grid in railwayreachable ranges. Thus, the geologic hazard value (C HA ) of an alignment can be accumulated by the F H of each grid cell traversed by the alignment.…”

Mountain railway alignment optimization integrating layouts of large‐scale auxiliary construction projects

“…With the major aims of locating linear infrastructures (Davey et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2013), configuring geometric characteristics (W. Vázquez-Méndez et al, 2021), and determining structural components (Kang & Schonfeld, 2020;, it generally determines the railway's construction cost (Lee et al, 2009), operational safety (Easa & Mehmood, 2008), environmental impact (Maji & Jha, 2009), and geologic risk (Pu, Xie, et al, 2021). However, due to the large-scale and highly constrained study area (Hong Zhang et al, 2021), multiple mutually conflicting and difficult-to-quantify objectives (Hirpa et al, 2016), numerous social and environmental influencing factors (Song, Pu, Schonfeld, Zhang, Li, Peng, et al, 2021) as well as many potential uncertainties (Song, Pu, Schonfeld, Hu, et al, 2022), railway alignment design is known as a complex task that, to a great extent, still depends on conventional manual work and expert experiences in the real world.…”

“…Alignment design is a crucial civil engineering problem that fundamentally influences the life‐cycle conditions of a railway project (Song, Pu, Schonfeld, Li, et al., 2020). With the major aims of locating linear infrastructures (Davey et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2013), configuring geometric characteristics (W. Li et al., 2019; Vázquez‐Méndez et al., 2021), and determining structural components (Kang & Schonfeld, 2020; Pu, Zhang, et al., 2019), it generally determines the railway's construction cost (Lee et al., 2009), operational safety (Easa & Mehmood, 2008), environmental impact (Maji & Jha, 2009), and geologic risk (Pu, Xie, et al., 2021).…”

Cost-suitability land modeling for current and proposed transport infrastructure along Timiș-Cerna Corridor (Romania)

“…Most studies based on multicriteria analyses performed in GIS environment use a cost model for assessing the opportunities for the development of transport networks, based on which various route options are subsequently proposed (Farooq et al, 2018(Farooq et al, , 2019Li et al, 2021). The suitability factors generally refer to lithology, topography parameters such as elevation or slope angle and the current land use, complemented in some cases with features related to hydrological or geomorphological risks (Pu et al, 2021). In Romania, various assessments of land suitability for the development of transport infrastructure were conducted along the Prahova Corridor (Dobre, 2011;Dobre, 2016), in Ţara Bârsei (Purcăreață et al, 2015) and for the Brașov-Bacău expressway route (Paunescu et al, 2019).…”