01557503

Component

The present paper proposes, for the first time, a game-theoretic bargaining based approach to allocating rail line capacity in the vertically integrated US rail system. A passenger rail agency (PRA) negotiates with a freight railroad to obtain appropriate train paths. This market has specific features: FRR charges PRA a fee for access to the railroad; on the other hand, FRR compensates PRA for delayed services. In addition, by US Public Law passenger trains have priority over all freight trains. Passenger demand is elastic with respect to the service schedule convenience. With these features explicitly taken into account, a multi-step, game-theoretic bargaining model is put forward. The authors analytically solve this game and show that a schedule that maximizes the sum of utilities of PRA and FRR is the efficient one. They derive the equation yielding the net internal transfer between the two entities, and show that which player initiating the bargaining game does not change the equilibrium schedule, but alters the net internal transfer.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR040 Freight Rail Transportation.

01550057

15-5160

English

17p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Game theory; Passenger trains; Railroads; Scheduling; Travel demand; Vertical integration

Rail capacity

Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Railroads; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-5160

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:44PM