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Rail Transit Optimization: History
Please note this is an old version of this entry, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Subjects: Transportation
Contributor: Eng Editorial Office

Rail transit optimization comprises the mathematical modeling and solution of operational planning problems in railway and urban metro systems, including line planning, train timetabling, rolling stock circulation, crew scheduling, and stop-skipping patterns [1]. The train timetabling problem determines the scheduled departure and arrival times of each train at each station, subject to safety constraints such as minimum headways, station track capacities, block-section occupancy rules, and speed restrictions, and it is typically formulated as a mixed-integer or multi-commodity flow model on a time-space network that represents each train path as a flow of units through nodes [2]. The objective function commonly balances long-term operational cost against service quality, minimizing fleet size, net energy consumption, or passenger waiting and in-vehicle travel time while satisfying time-dependent origin-destination travel demand; integrated approaches simultaneously optimize timetables, stop plans, and rolling stock assignments to account for the tight coupling between these interrelated operational planning decisions [3].

  • train timetabling
  • integer programming
  • rolling stock
  • time-space network
  • headway

Urban Transport Systems Analysis •  Civil and Structural Engineering •  Engineering •  Physical Sciences

References

  1. Alberto Caprara; Matteo Fischetti; Paolo Toth; Modeling and Solving the Train Timetabling Problem. Oper. Res. 2002, 50, 851-861, 10.1287/opre.50.5.851.362.
  2. Caprara, A.; Kroon, L.; Monaci, M.; Peeters, M.; Toth, P. Passenger railway optimization. In Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science; Barnhart, C.; Laporte, G., Eds.; Elsevier: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007; Volume 14, pp 129-187.
  3. Alberto Caprara; Michele Monaci; Paolo Toth; Pier Luigi Guida; A Lagrangian heuristic algorithm for a real-world train timetabling problem. Discret. Appl. Math. 2006, 154, 738-753, 10.1016/j.dam.2005.05.026.
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