Optimizing Railway Station Locations in Mountainous Areas Based on Weighted

To solve the problem of automatically setting railway station locations in the case where no alternatives can be selected, a method named "weighted mask transform" was proposed. This method is based on the grey correlation analysis theory and the coupling between railway alignment and station locations. First, the range of the station area was simplified as a rectangular mask of a given length and width. The locations of station centers were searched by moving the rectangular mask, while the stations directions were determined by rotating the mask. Then, an evaluation system including land use cost, earthwork cost, distance from residential areas, and the coupling degree of railway alignment and station locations was established. The weights of these evaluation indicators were assigned using the gray correlation analysis. Finally, calculations and ranking of the comprehensive costs of the station locations, which are obtained by moving and rotating the rectangular mask, were carried out to realize the optimization of station locations in continuous areas. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by applying it in an actual railway station in the southwest mountainous areas of China. Forty-nine alternatives were generated and ranked from low to high according to the comprehensive cost. The result shows that the method can assist the designers by automatically generating optimized railway station locations in complex mountainous regions.