The paper gives a brief review of publications on the application of formal methods for studying the regularities of the functioning of railway transport. In particular, the following problems are considered: application of system design methods in the development of high-speed railway facilities; simulating the operation of the magnetic levitation vehicle system, taking into account continuous changes in demand; developing a spatial balance model for a city served by competing commuter railroads; creation of an integrated computer model for quantitative risk assessment for the conceptual stage of designing the railway connection of the tunnel under the English Channel; extensions of the traditional gravity model for empirical analysis of the impact of transport costs and port efficiency on China's export flows. Further in the work, a piecewise linear regression model of the operational freight turnover of the East Siberian Railway was built. The following variables were used as input variables: the operating fleet of locomotives, the volume of loading cars per day, the static load on the car. The model parameters were estimated using a specialized program that implements the solution of the linear Boolean programming problem. The value of the average relative error of the model approximation is 0.85%. The vector of operations has been calculated, the analysis of which makes it possible to identify factors limiting the cargo turnover in each observation of the retrospective period. It turned out that for the four years of this period - from 2015 to 2017, as well as in 2022 - the growth in freight turnover was held back by the volume of the operating fleet of locomotives, from 2018 to 2020 - by the value of the static load, and in 2021 - by the volume of loading wagons. This information can be effectively used by the road authorities when planning their activities in the near future.
Носков et al. (Sun,) studied this question.