Analyzing the Railway Network of the Belt and Road Initiative

Yilmaz Uygun and Jahanzeb Ahsan

Cogent Business & Management, 2021, vol. 8, issue 1, 1932066

Abstract: Rail freight has exhibited significant growth within the last decade between Asia and Europe, especially after the announcement of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, which consists of seaborne and land routes. Within the latter one, this paper focuses on the railroad network that consists of six major corridors. Using the software AnyLogic (Version 8), we give a macroscopic model designed as a GIS-based discrete-event model of rail freight from China to Germany under existing border control point capacities, eventually providing a general overview toward the classification of different routes and countries and later ranking them according to their criticality index. This criticality index is computed as a product of time variance and the Logistics Performance Index. The former is obtained through various scenario analyses within the paradigm of shortest route and current border control points having constant capacity, but variable number of trains per day. In an attempt to understand the network under stress, the results obtained from this study also establish the need to increase the processing capacity at border control points to maximize the utilizability of this transcontinental railway network. The results show that lower capacity at border control points leads to higher time for trains to reach their destination. Stakeholders who are actively seeking to expand their Belt and Road Initiative investment or using rail transportation may understand when the network would reach peak performance and what measures could help to accomplish its maximum efficiency.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/23311975.2021.1932066 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:oabmxx:v:8:y:2021:i:1:p:1932066

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://cogentoa.tandfonline.com/journal/OABM20

DOI: 10.1080/23311975.2021.1932066

Access Statistics for this article

Cogent Business & Management is currently edited by Len Tiu Wright and Tahir Nisar

More articles in Cogent Business & Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().