Enhancing the interaction of railway timetabling and line planning with infrastructure awareness


Date

2022-09

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Planning a railway system is done in multiple stages that are typically intractable to optimize in an integrated manner. This work develops a novel iterative approach to tackle two of these stages jointly: line planning and timetabling. Compared to existing approaches that iteratively ban a whole conflicting line plan when the timetable is found infeasible, our method can accurately identify the smallest set of incompatible services. Besides, by efficiently exploiting the available railway infrastructure, our method accounts for all the possible routing options of trains, a feature commonly neglected to reduce complexity but that helps gaining timetable feasibility. Using real data from a railway company in Switzerland, we find that our approach is (i) practical for solving real-life instances, (ii) an order of magnitude faster than existing benchmarks, and (iii) able to solve more instances. Our insights shed light on the necessity of considering infrastructure and banning conflicts rather than line plans in the joint line planning and timetabling problem.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

142

Pages / Article No.

103805

Publisher

Elsevier

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Timetabling; Line planning; Integrated planning; Railways; Feasibility cuts

Organisational unit

09611 - Corman, Francesco / Corman, Francesco check_circle
02655 - Netzwerk Stadt u. Landschaft ARCH u BAUG / Network City and Landscape ARCH and BAUG

Notes

Funding

181210 - DADA - Dynamic data driven Approaches for stochastic Delay propagation Avoidance in railways (SNF)

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