This study is a first attempt to plan a HSR route for Ukraine. Since there is no previous academic study or governmental document that can provide information about route alternatives, this study began with the work of alternative generation.
High speed rail studies usually use ready alternatives, so there was no information found about generation of alternative routes. The previous studies usually regard either ready alternatives, or given corridors. For this reason this study introduces a formal algorithm that generates all possible alternative routes using given origin, destination and data about other cities of the country. Instead of spatial limitations (e. g. a predefined corridor), this algorithm uses a set of formal rules that work as constraints. They are applied at the search stage, when the algorithm searches for the cities that can be included into the route from given origin to destination. These rules help to cut off all the routes that cannot be feasible under any conditions.
Although algorithm currently operates only with population and location of cities, it can be improved by adding additional data, such as elevation, or constraints that make links between some cities impossible. This can be useful, for example, when there is a pair of cities on the route lie on the different sides of the wide bay that cannot be crossed. On the other hand, the algorithm should be improved carefully, because it uses recursive search component that can dramatically increase computation time with the increase of amount of the input data and/or constraints. This algorithm is implemented as a software application that was exclusively designed for this study in Borland Delphi 7 Lite.
The routes generated by the application are ranked using TOPSIS with regard to the route length and population coverage. The latter one is assumed to be a proxy to the transportation demand, generated along the line. Using these two criteria, the best five alternatives are chosen from the full list. Because of the weights obtained from the experts, the top-5 routes are mostly concerned about the overall population of the cities, connected by the HSR line.
Final decision about the most optimal route is made with respect to the estimated travel demand, construction complexity (built-up area crossing, water body crossing and bad slopes) and external effects (living area crossing and protected natural zone crossing). The optimal route determined in this study is the route “Kyiv - Cherkasy - Kirovohrad - Kryvyy Rih - Dniprodzerzhyns'k - Dnipropetrovs'k - Zaporizhzhya - Donets’k” with total demand of 1 584 618 417 pass-km.
The best and the second-best rotes are very close to each other, the difference is in one city:
instead of Zaporizhzhya the route goes via Pavlohrad. This route is 44.6 km shorter, but Pavlohrad is significantly smaller than Zaporizhzhya (110 470 and 772 627 respectively), so the predicted transportation demand for the second-best route is 1 317 486 515 pass-km, that is less than for the best choice. In the same time it has worse values of computation complexity and external effects indexes.
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The scope of this study is limited, because HSR planning process is very complicated, time and recourse consuming. Consequently, this leads to the fact that future research can contribute much to HSR studies in Ukraine. Possible future research directions could be as follows:
More sophisticated approach to the route planning that includes more objectives that should be satisfied (such as political feasibility, for example).
As it was already mentioned, this study relies on the AHP criteria that are probably not independent, so it will be useful for the future studies to improve this study by applying criteria that will fully satisfy the assumptions of AHP.
Route planning with better demand model, based on yearly transportation data between city pairs.
HSR influence on regional development of Ukraine.
Project financing study.
Conducting each of these studies requires large amounts of statistical data, issued by the national statistics, so the way statistics is collected and published should be altered. Currently it produces the data that can be used only under certain assumptions that lead to the distortion of results. There are three major improvements that are necessary for the future of the transportation studies in Ukraine:
Socio-economic data should not only be collected for the regions, but for the most important cities at least.
Data about transportation amount between the most important cities is also critical.
Ukrainian Railroad uses an electronic system, so this data exists, it just has to be processed and published (or provided on demand of the researcher).
Ukraine needs a national geospatial database that will contain data about elevation, terrain conditions and land use. Currently international data is used, where possible, but it is often issued by either country for itself, or by the large organization for its members. This means that the majority of digital maps for Europe concern only European Union and though omit Ukraine.
So, analysis of possibility of introducing HSR network in Ukraine should be regarded as a long run strategy for both government and academics. This study is just the first step and the amount of future works required to evaluate HSR is huge. One of the most important outcomes of this research is an identification of data shortage, because data that is available at the moment do not allow making a precise and trustworthy route characteristics estimation. That is why, the government of Ukraine should improve the way the national statistics is collected and published to meet the needs of future transportation research.
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