PROFITABILITY OF PASSENGER TRAFFIC

Abstract

The growth of profitability of passenger traffic is among the main tasks of railways. The best solution is to find an optimum balance between customer demand (possible train occupancy) and transportation offer (existing coaches rolling stock), taking into consideration the cycles of passenger flow variations (fluctuations considered weekly, by ten-day periods, monthly, seasonally, annually). The problem of optimization of traffic scheduling should not be limited to evaluation of profits from ticket sales and coach operational costs but should account for a number of qualitative and quantitative indices of the given route of a passenger train.

The profitability of passenger traffic depends mostly on two parameters: rate of passengers alteration (shift) and rate of operation use of train capacity. The critical values there-of are determined for seasonal cycles like «winter», «summer», «spring-fall». The created patterns help to forecast the number of passengers for forthcoming periods and to optimize thus the number of coaches operated for the given itinerary.

The researches have resulted in adoption of operation manual which governs train route scheduling and algorithms of specially engineered software packages. The results, if further implemented, may maximize profits of the railways.