Cost-minimized Design for HyperLoop Network with Heuristically Optimized Location and Number of the Stations

The study tried to design a HyerLoop network to maximize its passenger demand with the present transportation demand pattern in South Korea, and at the same time to minimize the construction cost of vacuum tube for the HyperLoop. This study used the OD trip data for demand analysis, which was officially distributed by the Korea Transportation Institute. In addition, we predicted passenger demand for HyperLoop by shifting from current transit modes for the cases of various scenarios related to speed and fare with assumption of maintaining same mode choice behavior as in present day.

It is assumed that those OD pairs having their distances longer than 63 miles (100 Km) can be served by the HyperLoop. The cities to be served by HyperLoop were selected by sorting its demand in descending order. Then, this study tried to build several cases for a set of selected cities by considering geographical distribution of the cities and possible corridor lines connecting cities close each other. After making serval cases of a set, a minimum spanning tree analysis was performed for a specific set of cities to find a cost-minimized network. Then, through a visual heuristic approach, several major corridors were selected again from the whole spanning tree network. After analyzing the partial minimum spanning tree analysis for each major corridor line and cities close each other, the solution for each corridor were combined all together into a whole network. After calculating the passenger demand and construction cost for each case, the HyperLoop network with the best combination attributes in terms of demand and cost was finally selected among all the cases.