Reliability evaluation of a multistate railway transportation network from the perspective of a travel agent

•Propose reliability of a railway transportation system from a travel agent's perspective.•Develop a multistate railway transportation model.•Develop an algorithm based on the concept of minimal required cabins for a tour group.•A practical case of Taiwan Railway Administration's railway transportation system is adopted.•The case shows the applicability and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Travelling by railway trains is usually the preferred option of travelers. Assessing whether a railway company can provide sufficient seats or cabins is meaningful for a travel agent to evaluate how the size of a tour group they can serve. A railway transportation system presents a set of available trains connecting the starting station and the destination station for a tour group according to their itinerary and the train timetable of a railway transportation company. The railway transportation system can be represented as a network with arcs denoting trains and nodes denoting starting, destination, and transfer stations. Because the available seats or cabins (i.e., capacity) in a train may be partially or fully reserved by other agents or groups, the capacity should be stochastic. Accordingly, the system can be modeled as a multistate railway transportation network. System reliability is defined as the probability that a tour group can successfully travel from the starting station to the destination station according to their itinerary, and can be a decision indicator for the travel agent. This study proposes an algorithm based on minimal paths to evaluate the system reliability. A case study of the railway transportation system in Taiwan is analyzed to demonstrate the applicability and computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm.