DOI: 10.1108/rs-05-2026-0036 ISSN: 2755-0907

Analysis of research status and development trends of railway system optimization

Pei Liu, Kexin Zhang, Mingming Wang

Purpose

Railway system optimization presents significant challenges, including complex coupling relationships among subsystems, difficulties in system modeling, and the common issues such as excessive simplification of parameters, constraints, and objective functions. This paper aims to review the current research status of railway system optimization, analyze the key problems it faces, and propose future development trends. The goal is to identify innovative approaches to enhance existing technologies, thereby achieving system-level optimization and comprehensive performance improvement.

Design/methodology/approach

The study first clarifies that railway system optimization is a multidisciplinary, multi-objective collaborative optimization problem. Then, it systematically summarizes the research status from three aspects: design parameter optimization, transportation organization optimization and application system optimization. The classification of optimization objectives, model construction, and solution algorithms is specifically described. Finally, considering the existing problems in the current optimization research, the paper proposes development strategies to improve the simulation fidelity and facilitate system-level integrated optimization.

Findings

Railway system optimization involves complex, interdependent, and mutually restrictive parameters among subsystems. The review finds that effectively addressing these requires coordinating internal subsystem parameters, solving inter-subsystem coupling issues, and adopting holistic optimization strategies.

Originality/value

This paper, in view of the current research status and methods of railway optimization, examines the problems posed by the complex coupling relationship of subsystems and difficulty of system modeling faced in optimization. Accordingly, it proposes development strategies to improve simulation fidelity and promote system-level integrated optimization.

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