TY - GEN A1 - Bortoletto, Enrico A1 - Lindner, Niels A1 - Masing, Berenike T1 - The tropical and zonotopal geometry of periodic timetables N2 - The Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP) is the standard mathematical tool for optimizing periodic timetabling problems in public transport. A solution to PESP consists of three parts: a periodic timetable, a periodic tension, and integer periodic offset values. While the space of periodic tension has received much attention in the past, we explore geometric properties of the other two components, establishing novel connections between periodic timetabling and discrete geometry. Firstly, we study the space of feasible periodic timetables, and decompose it into polytropes, i.e., polytopes that are convex both classically and in the sense of tropical geometry. We then study this decomposition and use it to outline a new heuristic for PESP, based on the tropical neighbourhood of the polytropes. Secondly, we recognize that the space of fractional cycle offsets is in fact a zonotope. We relate its zonotopal tilings back to the hyperrectangle of fractional periodic tensions and to the tropical neighbourhood of the periodic timetable space. To conclude we also use this new understanding to give tight lower bounds on the minimum width of an integral cycle basis. T3 - ZIB-Report - 22-09 KW - periodic event scheduling KW - tropical geometry KW - zonotopal tilings Y1 - 2022 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bortoletto, Enrico A1 - Lindner, Niels A1 - Masing, Berenike T1 - Tropical Neighbourhood Search: A New Heuristic for Periodic Timetabling N2 - Periodic timetabling is a central aspect of both the long-term organization and the day-to-day operations of a public transportation system. The Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP), the combinatorial optimization problem that forms the mathematical basis of periodic timetabling, is an extremely hard problem, for which optimal solutions are hardly ever found in practice. The most prominent solving strategies today are based on mixed-integer programming, and there is a concurrent PESP solver employing a wide range of heuristics [3]. We present tropical neighborhood search (tns), a novel PESP heuristic. The method is based on the relations between periodic timetabling and tropical geometry [4]. We implement tns into the concurrent solver, and test it on instances of the benchmarking library PESPlib. The inclusion of tns turns out to be quite beneficial to the solver: tns is able to escape local optima for the modulo network simplex algorithm, and the overall share of improvement coming from tns is substantial compared to the other methods available in the solver. Finally, we provide better primal bounds for five PESPlib instances. T3 - ZIB-Report - 22-13 KW - Periodic Timetabling KW - Tropical Geometry KW - Neighbourhood Search KW - Mixed-Integer Programming Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-87385 SN - 1438-0064 ER -