Short-term Rail Rolling Stock Rostering and Maintenance Scheduling (original) (raw)

Optimization in railway scheduling

Train scheduling has been a significant issue in the railway industry. Over the last few years, numerous approaches and tools have been developed to aid in the management of railway infrastructure. In this paper, we describe some techniques, which was developed in a project in collaboration with the Spanish Railway Infractructure Manager (ADIF). We formulate train scheduling as constraint optimization problems and present two filtering techniques for these problem types. These filtering techniques are developed to speed up and direct the search towards suboptimal solutions in periodic train scheduling problems. The feasibility of our problem-oriented techniques are confirmed with experimentation using real-life data. The results show that these techniques enables MIP solvers such as LINGO and ILOG Concert Technology (CPLEX c ⃝ ) to terminate earlier with good solutions.

A decision support system (DSS) for the railway scheduling problem

Artificial Intelligence …, 2004

The recent deregulation occurred in the public railway sector in many parts of the world has increased the awareness of this sector of the need for quality service that must be oered to its customers. In this paper, we present a software system for solving and plotting the Single-Track Railway Scheduling Problem eciently and quickly. The problem is formulated as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), which must be optimized. The solving process uses dierent stages to translate the problem into mathematical models, which are solved to optimality by means of mixed integer programming tools. The Decision Support System (DSS) we present allows the user to interactively specify the parameters of the problem, guarantees that constraints are satised and plots the optimized timetable obtained.

Re-scheduling in railways: the rolling stock balancing problem

2007

This paper addresses the Rolling Stock Balancing Problem (RSBP). This problem arises at a passenger railway operator when the rolling stock has to be re-scheduled due to changing circumstances. These problems arise both in the planning process and during operations.

A review of key planning and scheduling in the rail industry in Europe and UK

Planning and scheduling activities within the rail industry have benefited from developments in computer-based simulation and modelling techniques over the last 25 years. Increasingly, the use of computational intelligence in such tasks is featuring more heavily in research publications. This paper examines a number of common rail-based planning and scheduling activities and how they benefit from five broad technology approaches. Summary tables of papers are provided relating to rail planning and scheduling activities and to the use of expert and decision systems in the rail industry.

CREWS: A Train Scheduling Tool

WIT Transactions on the Built Environment, 1998

We present a tool, CREWS, for generating applications in personnel scheduling in transportation companies. Systems based on CREWS have been developed for the Portuguese Railways, the Dutch Railways, the Norwegian Railways, and the West Anglia Great Northern Railway (one of the operators of the British Rail). The initial version of CREWS supported long-term scheduling of drivers and guards, but current developments are extending it to support short-term planning as well. CREWS heavily relies on the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques and has been built in the perspective of a "white box" system, in the sense that the planner can perceive what is going on, can interact with the system by proposing alternatives or querying decisions, and can adapt the behaviour of the system to changing circumstances. Scheduling can be done in automatic, semi-automatic or manual mode. CREWS has mechanisms for dealing with the constant changes that occur in input data, can identify the c...

Train Scheduling and Rolling Stock Assignment in High Speed Trains

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014

The Train Timetabling Problem (TTP) has been widely studied for freight and passenger rail systems. A lesser effort has been devoted to the study of high-speed rail systems. A modeling issue that has to be addressed is to model departure time choice of passengers on railway services. Passengers who use these systems attempt to travel at predetermined hours due to their daily life necessities (e.g., commuter trips). We incorporate all these features into TTP focusing on high-speed railway systems. We propose a Rail Scheduling and Rolling Stock (RSch-RS) model for timetable planning of high-speed railway systems. This model is composed of two essential elements: i) an infrastructure model for representing the railway network: it includes capacity constraints of the rail network and the Rolling-Stock constraints; and ii) a demand model that defines how the passengers choose the departure time. The resulting model is a mixed-integer programming model which objective function attempts to maximize the profit for the rail operator.

An Effective Peak Period Heuristic for Railway Rolling Stock Planning

Transportation Science, 2019

In this work we tackle a real-world application of railway rolling stock planning, known as the train unit assignment problem (TUAP), arising for a regional train operator in the North of Italy. Given a set of timetabled train trips, each with a demand of passenger seats, as well as a set of train units, each with a cost and a number of available passenger seats, the goal is to determine the minimum cost daily assignment of the train units to the trips, satisfying a set of operational constraints. The context we focus on is that of a competitive bid process whereby a train operator competes to win a contract for providing rolling stock circulation in a regional railway network. From a theoretical perspective, we prove that even a relaxation of the TUAP is NP-hard. To solve the TUAP, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on the optimal solution of the restricted problem associated with a peak period (i.e., a period of the day in which many trips overlapping in time must be performed). The heuristic algorithm is tested on real-world instances provided by the regional train operator and on larger realistic instances of TUAP. The obtained results are compared with those of previously developed methods, showing the effectiveness of the new algorithm that finds optimal or near-optimal solutions and outperforms, for what concerns both the solution quality and the computing time, the considered methods from the literature.

Railways Scheduling and Rolling Stock Optimization using SAS

2019

Passenger comfort, optimal utilization of rolling stock and proper allocation of operational resources are the essential aspects for efficient management for any rail infrastructure. In this paper we address a scheduling problem for railways with the aim to minimize travel time of all the trains of a route by reducing the number of stoppages and optimal allocation of passenger quota/seats between every pair of stations in each train using modern SAS® technologies and SAS®/OR® software. An attempt is also made to investigate whether the given demand can be met by lesser number of trains. Mixed integer linear programming model is formulated to meet the two simultaneous decisions in scheduling objectiveto minimize the number of running trains as well as their stoppages. The computational results with real life study on Indian Rail Network show a significant reduction in the number of stoppages and trains while satisfying the given demand.

Solving train scheduling problems as a job shop: A brief review

Annals of Mathematics and Physics, 2022

An interesting practical problem is the single-track train scheduling problem which can be considered a job shop scheduling problem, namely since the sequence of sections is fi xed for a train route, it corresponds to fi xed machine routes (technological orders) in a job shop scheduling problem. However, for a train scheduling problem, typically some additional constraints such as blocking, sidings, stations with parallel tracks, deadlocks, train length, or headways, etc. have to be considered. The job shop problem has been well investigated in the literature and belongs to the hardest problems in scheduling theory. In this mini-review, some results in this area are discussed, where the main focus is on results that the author has obtained with his collaborators and Ph.D. students during the last decade.