@phdthesis{Schlechte2012, author = {Schlechte, Thomas}, title = {Railway Track Allocation: Models and Algorithms}, publisher = {S{\"u}dwestdeutscher Verlag f{\"u}r Hochschulschriften}, address = {Saarbr{\"u}cken, Germany}, isbn = {978-3-8381-3222-8}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:83-opus-34272}, school = {Technische Universit{\"a}t Berlin}, pages = {239}, year = {2012}, abstract = {This thesis is about mathematical optimization for the efficient use of railway infrastructure. We address the optimal allocation of the available railway track capacity - the track allocation problem. This track allocation problem is a major challenge for a railway company, independent of whether a free market, a private monopoly, or a public monopoly is given. Planning and operating railway transportation systems is extremely hard due to the combinatorial complexity of the underlying discrete optimization problems, the technical intricacies, and the immense sizes of the problem instances. Mathematical models and optimization techniques can result in huge gains for both railway customers and operators, e.g., in terms of cost reductions or service quality improvements. We tackle this challenge by developing novel mathematical models and associated innovative algorithmic solution methods for large scale instances. This allows us to produce for the first time reliable solutions for a real world instance, i.e., the Simplon corridor in Switzerland. The opening chapter gives a comprehensive overview on railway planning problems. This provides insights into the regulatory and technical framework, it discusses the interaction of several planning steps, and identifies optimization potentials in railway transportation. The remainder of the thesis is comprised of two major parts. The first part is concerned with modeling railway systems to allow for resource and capacity analysis. Railway capacity has basically two dimensions, a space dimension which are the physical infrastructure elements as well as a time dimension that refers to the train movements, i.e., occupation or blocking times, on the physical infrastructure. Railway safety systems operate on the same principle all over the world. A train has to reserve infrastructure blocks for some time to pass through. Two trains reserving the same block of the infrastructure within the same point in time is called block conflict. Therefore, models for railway capacity involve the definition and calculation of reasonable running and associated reservation and blocking times to allow for a conflict free allocation. In the second and main part of the thesis, the optimal track allocation problem for macroscopic models of the railway system is considered. The literature for related problems is surveyed. A graph-theoretic model for the track allocation problem is developed. In that model optimal track allocations correspond to conflict-free paths in special time-expanded graphs. Furthermore, we made considerable progress on solving track allocation problems by two main features - a novel modeling approach for the macroscopic track allocation problem and algorithmic improvements based on the utilization of the bundle method. Finally, we go back to practice and present in the last chapter several case studies using the tools netcast and tsopt. We provide a computational comparison of our new models and standard packing models used in the literature. Our computational experience indicates that our approach, i.e., ``configuration models'', outperforms other models. Moreover, the rapid branching heuristic and the bundle method enable us to produce high quality solutions for very large scale instances, which has not been possible before. In addition, we present results for a theoretical and rather visionary auction framework for track allocation. We discuss several auction design questions and analyze experiments of various auction simulations. The highlights are results for the Simplon corridor in Switzerland. We optimized the train traffic through this tunnel using our models and software tools. To the best knowledge of the author and confirmed by several railway practitioners this was the first time that fully automatically produced track allocations on a macroscopic scale fulfill the requirements of the originating microscopic model, withstand the evaluation in the microscopic simulation tool OpenTrack, and exploit the infrastructure capacity. This documents the success of our approach in practice and the usefulness and applicability of mathematical optimization to railway track allocation.}, language = {en} } @misc{BorndoerferSchwartzSurau2021, author = {Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Schwartz, Stephan and Surau, William}, title = {Rooted Maximum Weight Connected Subgraphs with Balancing and Capacity Constraints}, issn = {1438-0064}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-84427}, year = {2021}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{BorndoerferSchwartzSurau2021, author = {Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Schwartz, Stephan and Surau, William}, title = {Finding Minimum Balanced Separators - an Exact Approach}, booktitle = {Operations Research Proceedings 2021}, issn = {1438-0064}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08623-6_24}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-83138}, pages = {154 -- 159}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Balanced separators are node sets that split the graph into size bounded components. They find applications in different theoretical and practical problems. In this paper we discuss how to find a minimum set of balanced separators in node weighted graphs. Our contribution is a new and exact algorithm that solves Minimum Balanced Separators by a sequence of Hitting Set problems. The only other exact method appears to be a mixed-integer program (MIP) for the edge weighted case. We adapt this model to node weighted graphs and compare it to our approach on a set of instances, resembling transit networks. It shows that our algorithm is far superior on almost all test instances.}, language = {en} } @misc{ReutherBorndoerferSchlechteetal.2012, author = {Reuther, Markus and Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Schlechte, Thomas and Weider, Steffen}, title = {Integrated Optimization of Rolling Stock Rotations for Intercity Railways}, issn = {1438-0064}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-16424}, year = {2012}, abstract = {This paper provides a highly integrated solution approach for rolling stock planning problems in the context of intercity passenger traffic. The main contributions are a generic hypergraph based mixed integer programming model and an integrated algorithm for the considered rolling stock rotation planning problem. The new developed approach is able to handle a very large set of industrial railway requirements, such as vehicle composition, maintenance constraints, infrastructure capacity, and regularity aspects. By the integration of this large bundle of technical railway aspects, we show that our approach has the power to produce implementable rolling stock rotations for our industrial cooperation partner DB Fernverkehr. This is the first time that the rolling stock rotations at DB Fernverkehr could be optimized by an automated system utilizing advanced mathematical programming techniques.}, language = {en} } @misc{HillerVredeveld2012, author = {Hiller, Benjamin and Vredeveld, Tjark}, title = {Probabilistic alternatives for competitive analysis}, issn = {1438-0064}, doi = {10.1007/s00450-011-0149-1}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-15131}, year = {2012}, abstract = {In the last 20 years competitive analysis has become the main tool for analyzing the quality of online algorithms. Despite of this, competitive analysis has also been criticized: It sometimes cannot discriminate between algorithms that exhibit significantly different empirical behavior, or it even favors an algorithm that is worse from an empirical point of view. Therefore, there have been several approaches to circumvent these drawbacks. In this survey, we discuss probabilistic alternatives for competitive analysis.}, language = {en} } @misc{BorndoerferSchwartzSurau2021, author = {Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Schwartz, Stephan and Surau, William}, title = {Vertex Covering with Capacitated Trees}, issn = {1438-0064}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-82616}, year = {2021}, abstract = {The covering of a graph with (possibly disjoint) connected subgraphs is a fundamental problem in graph theory. In this paper, we study a version to cover a graph's vertices by connected subgraphs subject to lower and upper weight bounds, and propose a column generation approach to dynamically generate feasible and promising subgraphs. Our focus is on the solution of the pricing problem which turns out to be a variant of the NP-hard Maximum Weight Connected Subgraph Problem. We compare different formulations to handle connectivity, and find that a single-commodity flow formulation performs best. This is notable since the respective literature seems to have dismissed this formulation. We improve it to a new coarse-to-fine flow formulation that is theoretically and computationally superior, especially for large instances with many vertices of degree 2 like highway networks, where it provides a speed-up factor of 10 over the non-flow-based formulations. We also propose a preprocessing method that exploits a median property of weight constrained subgraphs, a primal heuristic, and a local search heuristic. In an extensive computational study we evaluate the presented connectivity formulations on different classes of instances, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements. Their speed-ups essentially multiply to an overall factor of 20. Overall, our approach allows the reliabe solution of instances with several hundreds of nodes in a few minutes. These findings are further corroborated in a comparison to existing districting models on a set of test instances from the literature.}, language = {en} } @misc{LindnerLiebchen2020, author = {Lindner, Niels and Liebchen, Christian}, title = {Determining all integer vertices of the PESP polytope by flipping arcs}, issn = {1438-0064}, doi = {10.4230/OASIcs.ATMOS.2020.5}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-78793}, year = {2020}, abstract = {We investigate polyhedral aspects of the Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP), the mathematical basis for periodic timetabling problems in public transport. Flipping the orientation of arcs, we obtain a new class of valid inequalities, the flip inequalities, comprising both the known cycle and change-cycle inequalities. For a point of the LP relaxation, a violated flip inequality can be found in pseudo-polynomial time, and even in linear time for a spanning tree solution. Our main result is that the integer vertices of the polytope described by the flip inequalities are exactly the vertices of the PESP polytope, i.e., the convex hull of all feasible periodic slacks with corresponding modulo parameters. Moreover, we show that this flip polytope equals the PESP polytope in some special cases. On the computational side, we devise several heuristic approaches concerning the separation of cutting planes from flip inequalities. These produce better dual bounds for the smallest and largest instance of the benchmarking library PESPlib.}, language = {en} } @misc{HarrodSchlechte2013, author = {Harrod, Steven and Schlechte, Thomas}, title = {A Direct Comparison of Physical Block Occupancy Versus Timed Block Occupancy in Train Timetabling Formulations}, issn = {1438-0064}, doi = {10.1016/j.tre.2013.04.003}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-17946}, year = {2013}, abstract = {Two fundamental mathematical formulations for railway timetabling are compared on a common set of sample problems, representing both multiple track high density services in Europe and single track bidirectional operations in North America. One formulation, ACP, enforces against conflicts by constraining time intervals between trains, while the other formulation, HGF, monitors physical occupation of controlled track segments. The results demonstrate that both ACP and HGF return comparable solutions in the aggregate, with some significant differences in select instances, and a pattern of significant differences in performance and constraint enforcement overall.}, language = {en} } @misc{RaackRaymondWerneretal.2013, author = {Raack, Christian and Raymond, Annie and Werner, Axel and Schlechte, Thomas}, title = {Integer Programming and Sports Rankings}, issn = {1438-0064}, doi = {10.1515/jqas-2013-0111}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-18068}, year = {2013}, abstract = {Sports rankings are obtained by applying a system of rules to evaluate the performance of the participants in a competition. We consider rankings that result from assigning an ordinal rank to each competitor according to their performance. We develop an integer programming model for rankings that allows us to calculate the number of points needed to guarantee a team the ith position, as well as the minimum number of points that could yield the ith place. The model is very general and can thus be applied to many types of sports. We discuss examples coming from football (soccer), ice hockey, and Formula~1. We answer various questions and debunk a few myths along the way. Are 40 points enough to avoid relegation in the Bundesliga? Do 95 points guarantee the participation of a team in the NHL playoffs? Moreover, in the season restructuration currently under consideration in the NHL, will it be easier or harder to access the playoffs? Is it possible to win the Formula~1 World Championship without winning at least one race or without even climbing once on the podium? Finally, we observe that the optimal solutions of the aforementioned model are associated to extreme situations which are unlikely to happen. Thus, to get closer to realistic scenarios, we enhance the model by adding some constraints inferred from the results of the previous years.}, language = {en} } @misc{Schlechte2012, author = {Schlechte, Thomas}, title = {Railway Track Allocation}, issn = {1438-0064}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-16402}, year = {2012}, abstract = {This article gives an overview of the results of the author's PhD thesis. The thesis deals with the mathematical optimization for the efficient use of railway infrastructure. We address the optimal allocation of the available railway track capacity - the track allocation problem. This track allocation problem is a major challenge for a railway company, independent of whether a free market, a private monopoly, or a public monopoly is given. Planning and operating railway transportation systems is extremely hard due to the combinatorial complexity of the underlying discrete optimization problems, the technical intricacies, and the immense sizes of the problem instances. Mathematical models and optimization techniques can result in huge gains for both railway customers and operators, e.g., in terms of cost reductions or service quality improvements. We tackle this challenge by developing novel mathematical models and associated innovative algorithmic solution methods for large scale instances. We made considerable progress on solving track allocation problems by two main features - a novel modeling approach for the macroscopic track allocation problem and algorithmic improvements based on the utilization of the bundle method. This allows us to produce for the first time reliable solutions for a real world instance, i.e., the Simplon corridor in Switzerland.}, language = {en} }