This book promotes the use of mathematical optimization and operations research methods in rail transportation. The editors assembled thirteen contributions from leading scholars to present a unified voice, standardize terminology, and assess the state-of-the-art.
There are three main clusters of articles, corresponding to the classical stages of the planning process: strategic, tactical, and operational. These three clusters are further subdivided into five parts which correspond to the main phases of the railway network planning process: network assessment, capacity planning, timetabling, resource planning, and operational planning. Individual chapters cover:
Simulation
Capacity Assessment
Network Design
Train Routing
Robust Timetabling
Event Scheduling
Track Allocation
Blocking
Shunting
Rolling Stock
Crew Scheduling
Dispatching
Delay Propagation
Regenerating braking energy is one major pathway to make rail traffic energy-efficient. It is therefore desirable to design timetables that exploit this feature. However, timetables that allow to regenerate energy are often bad for the passengers. We hence formulate and analyze a bicriteria optimization problem (PESP-Passenger-Energy) to find periodic railway timetables that maximize the regenerated energy in terms of the brake-traction overlap time and minimize the travel time of the passengers. Our model extends the Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP) and offers a rich combinatorial theory. We investigate its computational complexity on one-station networks, building on matchings and Hamiltonian paths. Besides showing its NP-hardness even for a single objective, we identify several polynomial-time solvable special cases. Finally, we provide two case studies, underlining the practicability of our model, and analyzing the Pareto front.
