By Jake Kays
Ever travelled to Japan, Europe, China or Korea?
Did you jump on a high-speed rail while you were there?
If you did, you would have experienced 200+ km/h travel minimal waiting, hassles or delays.
Now, I love flying as much as the next guy. But driving 40 minutes out of the city finding a park at the airport, paying $30 a day for it, waiting for a bus to the terminal, waiting in line at the terminal, waiting to go through security, waiting at the boarding gate, waiting for the guy in front of me to squeeze his baggage in the overhead locker, waiting for him to get it out when we land, waiting to queue off the plane, waiting for my baggage, waiting for a cab, then waiting to be driven into the city.
All this to fly from Melbourne to Sydney! I’m exhausted!
What if I could hop on a train in Melbourne’s CBD and be in the heart of Sydney 3 hours later.
Hmm.. Sounds tempting.
Should we construct such a service in Australia?
Given that 80% of us live on the East Coast, could we throw in a line straight up and down the whole coast?
Well I’m not going to give you a yes or no answer whether we should implement such an enormous and expensive operation.
My research posed the question: If Australia constructs a high-speed rail network, where should the stations be located?
I answered this question with the aid of Optimisation. Optimisation is a Mathematical process used to make decisions based off data, constraints and an objective function.
I used an Optimisation model inspired from Hugo M. Repolho, António P. Antunes, and Richard L. Church who in 2011 optimised station locations for the Lisbon-Porto high-speed rail line in Europe.
The model aims to maximise the travel cost savings and adheres to a number of restrictions.
Data for this project was gathered from reports produced by the Australian Government “High Speed Study 1 and 2”. The reports present proposed alignments and short listed station locations. The model was coded in IBM’s OPL Optimisation studio with the accompanying data.
We obtained the following results.
Construct stations at Melbourne, Shepparton, Wagga Wagga Canberra and Sydney and remove stations from Albury Wodonga and Southern Highlands.
Would you like a high-speed rail in Australia?
Jake Kays was one of the recipients of a 2013/14 AMSI Vacation Research Scholarship.