TY - GEN A1 - Masing, Berenike A1 - Lindner, Niels A1 - Borndörfer, Ralf T1 - The Price of Symmetric Line Plans in the Parametric City N2 - We consider the line planning problem in public transport in the Parametric City, an idealized model that captures typical scenarios by a (small) number of parameters. The Parametric City is rotation symmetric, but optimal line plans are not always symmetric. This raises the question to quantify the symmetry gap between the best symmetric and the overall best solution. For our analysis, we formulate the line planning problem as a mixed integer linear program, that can be solved in polynomial time if the solutions are forced to be symmetric. The symmetry gap is provably small when a specific Parametric City parameter is fixed, and we give an approximation algorithm for line planning in the Parametric City in this case. While the symmetry gap can be arbitrarily large in general, we show that symmetric line plans are a good choice in most practical situations. T3 - ZIB-Report - 22-01 KW - line planning KW - mixed integer programming KW - parametric city modeling Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-85648 SN - 1438-0064 ER -