A Variance Maximization Based Weight Optimization Method for Railway Transportation Safety Performance Measurement

Dongye Sun, Yuanhua Jia, Lingqiao Qin, Yang Yang and Juyong Zhang
Additional contact information
Dongye Sun: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Yuanhua Jia: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Lingqiao Qin: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Yang Yang: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Juyong Zhang: School of Mechanical Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-13

Abstract: Based on the idea of maximizing variances, a weight optimization method is proposed in this research to improve railway transportation safety evaluation. Firstly, the main evaluation indicators that can reflect the safety of railway transportation are selected as the independent variables. Secondly, in order to avoid the influence of experts’ empowerment on the evaluation results of railway transport safety, fuzzy set theory is introduced to generate the variation range of the weights of each evaluation index, which is used as the constraint of weight optimization model. Then, the weight optimization model for railway transportation safety performance measurement is established based on the principle of maximum variance. The structure of the optimization model shows the characteristics of the quadratic programming model. Therefore, the optimal weight is calculated by using the branch bounded algorithm, which is one of the quadratic programming model solution algorithms. Finally, the empirical analysis of the safety performance measurement for 18 railway bureaus shows that using the optimized index weight for safety performance measurement can not only make full use of prior information but also ensure that 18 railway bureaus can be distinguished to the maximum extent.

Keywords: railway transportation; safety performance measurement; weight optimization; variance maximization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2903/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2903/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:8:p:2903-:d:164026

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().