Refine
Year of publication
- 2017 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (2)
Institute
Planning and operating railway transportation systems is an extremely hard task due to the combinatorial complexity of the underlying discrete optimization problems, the technical intricacies, and the immense size of the problem instances. Because of that, however, mathematical models and optimization techniques can result in large gains for both railway customers and operators, e.g., in terms of cost reductions or service quality improvements. In the last years a large and growing group of researchers in the OR community have devoted their attention to this domain developing mathematical models and optimization approaches to tackle many of the relevant problems in the railway planning process. However, there is still a gap to bridge between theory and practice (e.g. Cacchiani et al., 2014; Borndörfer et al., 2010), with a few notable exceptions. In this paper we address three individual success stories, namely, long-term freight train routing (part I), mid-term rolling stock rotation planning (part II), and real-time train dispatching (part III). In each case, we describe real-life, successful implementations. We will discuss the individual problem setting, survey the optimization literature, and focus on particular aspects addressed by the mathematical models. We demonstrate on concrete applications how mathematical optimization can support railway planning and operations. This gives proof that mathematical optimization can support the planning of railway resources. Thus, mathematical models and optimization can lead to a greater efficiency of railway operations and will serve as a powerful and innovative tool to meet recent challenges of the railway industry.
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.