G. Mathematics of Computing
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The optimization of periodic timetables is an indispensable planning task in public transport. Although the periodic event scheduling problem (PESP) provides an elegant mathematical formulation of the periodic timetabling problem that led to many insights for primal heuristics, it is notoriously hard to solve to optimality. One reason is that for the standard mixed-integer linear programming formulations, linear programming relaxations are weak and the integer variables are of pure technical nature and in general do not correlate with the objective value. While the first problem has been addressed by developing several families of cutting planes, we focus on the second aspect. We discuss integral forward cycle bases as a concept to compute improved dual bounds for PESP instances. To this end, we develop the theory of forward cycle bases on general digraphs. Specifically for the application of timetabling, we devise a generic procedure to construct line-based event-activity networks, and give a simple recipe for an integral forward cycle basis on such networks. Finally, we analyze the 16 railway instances of the benchmark library PESPlib, match them to the line-based structure and use forward cycle bases to compute better dual bounds for 14 out of the 16 instances.
Periodic timetable optimization problems in public transport can be modeled as mixed-integer linear programs by means of the Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP). In order to keep the branch-and-bound tree small, minimum integral cycle bases have been proven successful. We examine forward cycle bases, where no cycle is allowed to contain a backward arc. After reviewing the theory of these bases, we describe the construction of an integral forward cycle basis on a line-based event-activity network. Adding turnarounds to the instance \texttt{R1L1} of the benchmark library PESPlib, we computationally evaluate three types of forward cycle bases in the Pareto sense, and come up with significant improvements concerning dual bounds.
We investigate preprocessing for single-source shortest path queries in digraphs, where arc costs are only known to lie in an interval. More precisely, we want to decide for each arc whether it is part of some shortest path tree for some realization of costs. We show that this problem is solvable in polynomial time by giving a combinatorial algorithm, using optimal structures that we call forks. Our algorithm turns out to be very efficient in practice, and is sometimes even superior in quality to a heuristic developed for the one-to-one shortest path problem in the context of passenger routing in public transport.
We investigate polyhedral aspects of the Periodic Event Scheduling Problem (PESP), the mathematical basis for periodic timetabling problems in public transport. Flipping the orientation of arcs, we obtain a new class of valid inequalities, the flip inequalities, comprising both the known cycle and change-cycle inequalities. For a point of the LP relaxation, a violated flip inequality can be found in pseudo-polynomial time, and even in linear time for a spanning tree solution. Our main result is that the integer vertices of the polytope described by the flip inequalities are exactly the vertices of the PESP polytope, i.e., the convex hull of all feasible periodic slacks with corresponding modulo parameters. Moreover, we show that this flip polytope equals the PESP polytope in some special cases. On the computational side, we devise several heuristic approaches concerning the separation of cutting planes from flip inequalities. These produce better dual bounds for the smallest and largest instance of the benchmarking library PESPlib.