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

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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.

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