Fair Railway Network Design
This work addresses fairness in transportation network design, which is an incremental improvement over purely utilitarian approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of designing public transportation networks that balance utilitarian efficiency with fairness, specifically to avoid disadvantaging peripheral cities. It proposes a model and algorithms, and reports experimental results using real data.
When designing a public transportation network in a country, one may want to minimise the sum of travel duration of all inhabitants. This corresponds to a purely utilitarian view and does not involve any fairness consideration, as the resulting network will typically benefit the capital city and/or large central cities while leaving some peripheral cities behind. On the other hand, a more egalitarian view will allow some people to travel between peripheral cities without having to go through a central city. We define a model, propose algorithms for computing solution networks, and report on experiments based on real data.