Design of Optimum Railroad Alignments Using Ant Colony Optimization<br/>

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Design of Optimum Railroad Alignments Using Ant Colony Optimization

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Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
Language: Farsi
Document No: 40359 (09)
University: Sharif University of Technology
Department: Civil Engineering
Advisor(s): Shafahi, Yousef
Abstract:
Optimum railroad alignment, which can be categorized into continuous problems, has been a conundrum for engineers because of two reasons: At the first, there is a wide variety of information that is necessary for finding optimum one. Secondly, the major costs of a railway, such as length-dependent, traffic-dependent, volume-dependent and location-dependent are affected by the numerous factors so that, it may be difficult to formulate them. In order to solve large scale continuous optimization problems, there are two approaches: firstly, such problems may be tackled with a combinatorial optimization algorithm, e.g. ant colony optimization (ACO), by the continuous range of allowed values are converted into finite feasible solutions. Secondly, present a method that can be adopted to continuous optimization without any change in its domain. In this research, we present two extensions of ant colony optimization to solve optimum railway alignment as a continuous optimization problem. Furthermore, we attempt to embed a GIS-base model for calculating the cost of railroad into two proposed optimization methods. Finally, we applied the suggested methods for a real world example as case study in this research.
Keywords:
Railway ; Optimal Motion ; Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) ; Geographic Information System (GIS)