Railway projects prioritisation for investment: Application of goal programming

This research develops a weighted integer goal-programming model for prioritising railway projects for investment. The goal of the model is to prioritise the identified projects for investment while maximising the objectives and meeting the budget limit for capital investment. The model minimises the goal deviations of the objectives. The objectives of the model include quantitative and qualitative attributes. The model is applied to prioritise the new railway projects, which have a total cost of Euro 2 billion for capital investment, identified and analysed by Department of Transport, Ireland. Even though the objective is maximising all the attributes, the investment decision is subject to financial availability. The study recommends investment options at different capital investment levels when the decision is made on the basis of economic benefits, revenue or qualitative goal scores.