Railway Timetable Generation

This book contains the 14th proceedings of the, very successful, International conference on Railway Engineering Design and Optimization (COMPRAIL 2014), which began in 1987. Encouraging the update and use of advanced systems, the book promotes their general awareness throughout the business management, design, manufacture and operation of railways and other emerging passenger, freight and transit systems. It particularly emphasises the use of computer systems in advanced railway engineering. Topics covered include: Timetable planning; Computer techniques and simulations; Actual train control; Operations quality; Risk management; Planning; Monitoring and maintenance; Energy supply and consumption; Communications and signalling; Rescheduling; Safety and security; Railway vehicle dynamics; Driverless and automatic train operation.

Forming the 16th volume from this successful series, this book contains papers from the 16th International Conference on Railway Engineering Design and Operation. The included papers are a collection of works from researchers, academics and practitioners involved in railway engineering. There is a continuing need to update the use of advanced systems, promoting their general awareness throughout the management, design, manufacture and operation of railways and other emerging passenger, freight and transit systems. By emphasising the use of computer systems in advanced railway engineering, this book contributes to this goal. These research studies will be of interest to all those involved in the development of railways, including managers, consultants, railway engineers, designers of advanced train control systems and computer specialists.

This book treats three planning problems arising in public railway transportation planning: line planning, timetabling, and delay management, with the objective to minimize passengers’ travel time. While many optimization approaches simplify these problems by assuming that passengers’ route choice is independent of the solution, this book focuses on models which take into account that passengers will adapt their travel route to the implemented planning solution. That is, a planning solution and passengers’ routes are determined and evaluated simultaneously. This work is technically deep, with insightful finding regarding complexity and algorithmic approaches to public transportation problems with integrated passenger routing. It is intended for researchers in the fields of mathematics, computer science, or operations research, working in the field of public transportation from an optimization standpoint. It is also ideal for students who want to gain intuition and experience in doing complexity proofs and designing polynomial-time algorithms for network problems. The book models line planning, timetabling and delay management as combined design and routing problems on networks. In a complexity analysis, the border between NP-hard and polynomially solvable problems is illustrated. Based on that, the insights gained are used to develop solution approaches for the considered problems. Besides integer programming formulations, a heuristic method iterating planning and routing step is proposed to solve the problems.

The rail-based transit system is a popular public transportation option, not just with members of the public but also with policy makers looking to install a form of convenient and rapid travel. Even for moving bulk freight long distances, a rail-based system is the most sustainable transportation system currently available. The Handbook of Research on Emerging Innovations in Rail Transportation Engineering presents the latest research on next-generation public transportation infrastructures. Emphasizing a diverse set of topics related to rail-based transportation such as funding issues, policy design, traffic planning and forecasting, and engineering solutions, this comprehensive publication is an essential resource for transportation planners, engineers, policymakers, and graduate-level engineering students interested in uncovering research-based solutions, recommendations, and examples of modern rail transportation systems.

One of the most important things to consider before constructing a railway is the train operating program. However, the analysis of the operating program based train schedule in the railway planning stage is carried out mainly on the basis of the intuitive experiences of the planner, and the optimization of the train schedule under various conditions is not properly considered. This study analyzes the optimization of heterogeneous train scheduling structures with minimizing the weighted scheduled waiting time and with the decision of Subsidiary Main Track (SMT) for overtaking of high-speed trains on the railway line. As a way for analyzing the Optimal Train Schedule (OTS) under constraint conditions, the genetic algorithm is used. The genetic algorithm is widely applied to various optimization and decision-making problems in engineering, natural sciences, business administration, and social sciences. The proposed method can examine train schedules for more scenarios, apply quantitative evaluation criteria, and review concrete infrastructures in comparison to the existing empirical method used in South Korea.

This Festschrift volume is published to honour both Dines Bjørner and Zhou Chaochen on the occasion of their 70th birthdays. The volume includes 25 refereed papers by leading researchers, current and former colleagues, who congregated at a celebratory symposium held in Macao, China, in the course of the International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, ICTAC 2007. The papers cover a broad spectrum of subjects.

Public transport brings undisputed benefits to modern-day societies. Aside from providing an affordable means to get around, its supreme efficiency in comparison with private transport plays a crucial role in curbing congestion and pollution, highlighting the importance of adequate design and operation of public transport systems. The first part of this thesis seeks to improve the planning process of public transport operators by integrating planning steps that are traditionally performed sequentially. The first study considers a combination of line planning and vehicle scheduling, and presents methods that estimate how many vehicles are required to operate a line plan, without having to compute a timetable. The second study combines timetabling and vehicle scheduling, and develops a novel optimization model for jointly optimizing a periodic timetable and vehicle circulation schedule. The second part of this thesis investigates decentralized strategies for operating public transport, with a focus on railway systems. Such strategies could be preferable over conventional centralized and schedule-based control in various scenarios. The first study in this part presents a theoretical analysis of a simple, decentralized strategy for dispatching vehicles. The second study considers the application of decentralized control to out-of-control situations in railways, which includes the development of a solution algorithm to find line plans that are suited for these circumstances. The final study in this thesis tests decentralized dispatching of both vehicles and crew in a microscopic railway simulation.