The New Dutch Timetable: The OR Revolution

Abstract

In December 2006, Netherlands Railways introduced a completely new timetable. Its objective was to facilitate the growth of passenger and freight transport on a highly utilized railway network and improve the robustness of the timetable, thus resulting in fewer operational train delays. Modifications to the existing timetable, which was constructed in 1970, were not an option; additional growth would require significant investments in the rail infrastructure.Constructing a railway timetable from scratch for about 5,500 daily trains was a complex problem. To support this process, we generated several timetables using sophisticated operations research techniques. Furthermore, because rolling-stock and crew costs are principal components of the costs of a passenger railway operator, we used innovative operations research tools to devise efficient schedules for these two resources.The new resource schedules and the increased number of passengers resulted in an additional annual profit of E40 million ($60 million); the additional revenues generated approximately E10 million of this profit. We expect this profit to increase to E70 million ($105 million) annually in the coming years. However, the benefits of the new timetable for the Dutch society as a whole are much greater: more trains are transporting more passengers on the same railway infrastructure, and these trains are arriving and departing on schedule more than they ever have in the past. In addition, the rail transport system will be able to handle future transportation demand growth and thus allow cities to remain accessible to more people. Therefore, we expect that many will switch from car transport to rail transport, thus reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.

Robust routing and timetabling in complex railway stations

“…Most models solving this problem are based on the periodic event scheduling problem (PESP) (e.g. Serani and Ukovich, 1989;Kroon et al, 2009;Cacchiani et al, 2012;Liebchen et al, 2007;Schmidt and Schöbel, 2015). In the PESP, arrival and departure times of trains in stations are events.…”

“…This is possible since we immediately work on the microscopic scale. Other examples in this category are Zwaneveld et al (1996Zwaneveld et al ( , 2001); Kroon et al (2009) and Schlechte et al (2011). Also the research of (Lamorgese et al, 2016) belongs to this category.…”

Column Generation with Dynamic Duty Selection for Railway Crew Rescheduling

“…The best example is probably the introduction of a completely new timetable on the Dutch railway network in 2006, for which Netherlands Railways recently won the Franz Edelman Award (Kroon et al (2009)). As in this example, OR methods have mainly been used to solve planning problems (see Huisman et al (2005); Caprara et al (2007) for recent surveys).…”

Valuing Convenience in Public Transport

“…With regard to Dutch railways, Kroon et al (2009) point out: "To increase the robustness of the timetable, we increased the running times, dwell times, and headway times by time supplements based on experience and expert opinions. Time supplements in the running and dwell times absorb small disturbances in the real-time operations, allowing trains to recover from delays.…”