Selection of consolidation centres for China Railway Express

Driven by insufficient supply, malign competition and high operating cost of China Railway (CR) Express, this paper investigates the selection of consolidation centres in China. It first constructs an evaluation indicator system for determining an origin city’s suitability as a consolidation centre, and then uses TOPSIS to rank 48 origin cities (operating CR Express directly) as consolidation candidates. After that, cluster analysis and correspondence analysis are applied to select the consolidation centres among 48 candidates. Ten of them — Tianjin, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Urumchi, Xi’an, Zhengzhou, Changsha, Shanghai and Harbin are finally identified as CR Express consolidation centres. Based on this result, this paper constructs the consolidation networks based on the shortest highway distance within 500 km from origin cities to the consolidation centres.