Optimization Problems in Passenger Railway Systems

Caprara, Alberto; Kroon, Leo; Toth, Paolo

doi:10.1002/9780470400531.eorms0647

Cited by 25 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…There are also other optimisation models that do not use stochasticity. The following publications describe each type of approach: The survey by Caprara et al (2011) has listed several optimisation problems in railway systems. They list robustness issues as one type of problem, which has gained increasing interest.…”

Section: Optimisation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of Robustness in Railway Traffic Timetables

Andersson

2014

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A tendency seen for the last decades in many European railway networks is a growing demand for capacity. An increased number of operating trains has led to a delay sensitive system where it is hard to recover from delays, where even relatively small delays are easily propagating to other traffic.The overall aim of this thesis is to analyse the robustness of railway traffic timetables; why delays are propagating in the network and how the timetable design and dispatching strategies influence the delays. In this context we want to establish quantitative measures of timetable robustness. There is a need for measures that can be used by the timetable constructors. Measures that identify where and how to improve the robustness and thereby indicating how and where margin time should be inserted. It is also important that the measures can capture interdependencies between different trains.In this thesis we introduce the concept of critical points, which is a practical approach to identify robustness weaknesses in a timetable. In contrast to other measures, critical points can be used to identify specific locations in both time and space. The corresponding measure, Robustness in Critical Points (RCP) provides the timetable constructors with concrete suggestions for which trains that should be given more runtime or headway margin. The measure also identifies where the margin time should be allocated to achieve a higher robustness.In a case study we show that the delay propagation is highly related to the operational train dispatching. This study shows that the current prioritisation rule used in Sweden results in an economic inefficiency and therefore should be revised. This statement is further supported by RCP and the importance of giving the train dispatchers more flexibility to efficiently solve conflict situations.

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Section: Optimisation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of Robustness in Railway Traffic Timetables

Andersson

2014

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“…It is easy to see that the last two of these functions precisely define the application context of the present study, and it is worth noting that such a context is much broader than running the buses in a medium-size city like Bologna. In fact, the methodology can be applied to virtually any public transportation service that is outsourced, e.g., metro or local trains for commuters (see, e.g., Caprara et al 2010), home-healthcare services (see, e.g., Hiermann et al 2015), transportation of handicapped people (see, e.g., Toth and Vigo 1997), etc.…”

Section: Contract Regulation (In Public Service)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Control of Public-Service Contracts and an Application to Public Transportation Systems

Lodi¹,

Malaguti

Stier-Moses

et al. 2016

Management Science

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U ntil the end of the 20th century it was common that cities organized, financed, and managed their own public transportation systems. More recently (in Italy mainly during the last decade), many countries liberalized the service provision of public transportation. Although offering local public transportation is a political and financial duty of governments, the service provision is outsourced to a private operator, while the government retains a control position, given to a regulatory agency. This is a common scheme not only in transportation. In close collaboration with the public transportation agency of the city of Bologna, Italy, we designed a methodology to optimize some aspects of the contractual relationship between that agency and the bus operator. We focus on the fines specified by the contract when the operator fails to comply with the service level it has agreed to provide, and on a procedure to measure that service level. Our approach has the advantage that it aligns the incentives of both parties to the benefit of bus riders. We model the agency-operator relationship as a multistage game and find its equilibrium to establish the best operating regime. The gametheoretical approach provides expressions for the fines that the operator should be charged if it does not satisfy the contracted services, and for the optimal agency's budget to devote to control activities. Second, to check the compliance of the operator with the schedule specified by the contract in a resource-efficient way, we compute how to position the agency's employees to verify if buses are running according to the specifications of the contract. This is achieved by counting bus services and by checking other quality indicators. We formulate this NP-hard problem as a mixed integer linear program and propose an algorithm to solve it that is effective in providing itineraries for the controllers working for the agency.

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“…See a survey on railway rescheduling in Cacchiani et al (2014). For surveys on methodological approaches in general railway planning, see Caprara et al (2007Caprara et al ( , 2011 ;Huisman et al (2005).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A branch-and-price approach for solving the train unit scheduling problem

Lin

Kwan

2016

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological

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We propose a branch-and-price approach for solving the integer multicommodity flow model for the network-level train unit scheduling problem (TUSP). Given a train operator's fixed timetable and a fleet of train units of different types, the TUSP aims at determining an assignment plan such that each train trip in the timetable is appropriately covered by a single or coupled train units. The TUSP is challenging due to its complex nature. Our branch-and-price approach includes a branching system with multiple branching rules for satisfying real-world requirements that are difficult to realize by linear constraints, such as unit type coupling compatibility relations and locations banned for coupling/decoupling. The approach also benefits from an adaptive node selection method, a column inheritance strategy and a feature of estimated upper bounds with node reservation functions. The branch-and-price solver designed for TUSP is capable of handling instances of up to about 500 train trips. Computational experiments were conducted based on real-world problem instances from First ScotRail. The results are satisfied by rail practitioners and are generally competitive or better than the manual ones.

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Optimization Problems in Passenger Railway Systems

Cited by 25 publications

References 26 publications

Assessment of Robustness in Railway Traffic Timetables

Assessment of Robustness in Railway Traffic Timetables

Design and Control of Public-Service Contracts and an Application to Public Transportation Systems

A branch-and-price approach for solving the train unit scheduling problem

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