Refine
Document Type
- Article (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Institute
Rolling stock, i.e., the set of railway vehicles, is among the most
expensive and limited assets of a railway company and must be used
efficiently. We consider in this paper the re-optimization
problem to recover from unforeseen disruptions. We propose a
template concept that allows to recover cost minimal rolling
stock rotations from reference rotations under a large variety of
operational requirements. To this end, connection templates as
well as rotation templates are introduced and their
application within a rolling stock rotation planning model is
discussed. We present an implementation within the rolling stock rotation
optimization framework rotor and computational results for
scenarios provided by DB Fernverkehr AG, one of the
leading railway operators in Europe.
A railway operator creates (rolling stock) rotations in order to have a precise master plan for the operation of a timetable by railway vehicles. A rotation is considered as a cycle that multiply traverses a set of operational days while covering trips of the timetable. As it is well known, the proper creation of rolling stock rotations by, e.g., optimization algorithms is challenging and still a topical research subject. Nevertheless, we study a completely different but strongly related question in this paper, i.e.: How to visualize a rotation? For this purpose, we introduce a basic handout concept, which directly leads to the visualization, i.e., handout of a rotation. In our industrial application at DB Fernverkehr AG, the handout is exactly as important as the rotation itself. Moreover, it turns out that also other European railway operators use exactly the same methodology (but not terminology). Since a rotation can have many handouts of different quality, we show how to compute optimal ones through an integer program (IP) by standard software. In addition, a construction as well as an improvement heuristic are presented. Our computational results show that the heuristics are a very reliable standalone approach to quickly find near-optimal and even optimal handouts. The efficiency of the heuristics is shown via a computational comparison to the IP approach.