90C10 Integer programming
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- combinatorial optimization (5)
- integer programming (5)
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Duty Scheduling Templates
(2012)
We propose duty templates as a novel concept to produce similar duty
schedules for similar days of operation in public transit. Duty templates
can conveniently handle various types of similarity requirements, and
they can be implemented with ease using standard algorithmic techniques.
They have produced good results in practice.
Vehicle rotation planning is a fundamental problem in
rail transport. It decides how the railcars, locomotives, and
carriages are operated in order to implement the trips of the
timetable. One important planning requirement is operational
regularity, i.e., using the rolling stock in the same way on every
day of operation. We propose to take regularity into account by
modeling the vehicle rotation planning problem as a minimum cost
hyperassignment problem (HAP). Hyperassignments are generalizations
of assignments from directed graphs to directed hypergraphs.
Finding a minimum cost hyperassignment is
NP-hard.
Most instances arising from regular vehicle rotation planning, however, can
be solved well in practice. We show that, in particular, clique
inequalities strengthen the canonical LP relaxation substantially.
We propose a novel integer programming approach to transfer minimization for line planning problems in public transit. The idea is to incorporate penalties for transfers that are induced by “connection capacities” into the construction of the passenger paths. We show that such penalties can be dealt with by a combination of shortest and constrained shortest path algorithms such that the pricing problem for passenger paths can be solved efficiently. Connection capacity penalties (under)estimate the true transfer times. This error is, however, not a problem in practice. We show in a computational comparison with two standard models on a real-world scenario that our approach can be used to minimize passenger travel and transfer times for large-scale line planning problems with accurate results.
Robust Tail Assignment
(2010)
We propose an efficient column generation method to minimize the probability of delay propagations along aircraft rotations. In this way, delay resistant schedules can be constructed. Computational results for large-scale real-world problems demonstrate substantial punctuality improvements. The method can be generalized to crew and integrated scheduling problems.
The Vehicle Positioning Problem (VPP) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem in public transport planning. A number of models and approaches have been suggested in the literature, which work for small problems, but not for large ones. We propose in this article a novel set partitioning model and an associated column generation solution approach for the VPP. The model provides a tight linear description of the problem. The pricing problem, and hence the LP relaxation itself, can be solved in polynomial resp. pseudo-polynomial time for some versions of the problems.
The Vehicle Positioning Problem (VPP) consists of the assignment of vehicles (buses, trams or trains) of a public transport or railway company to parking positions in a depot and to timetabled trips. Such companies have many different types of vehicles, and each trip can be performed only by vehicles of some of these types. These assignments are non-trivial due to the topology of depots. The parking positions are organized in tracks, which work as one- or two-sided stacks or queues. If a required type of vehicle is not available in the front of any track, shunting movements must be performed in order to change vehicles' positions, which is undesirable and should be avoided. In this text we present integer linear and non-linear programming formulations for some versions of the problem and compare them from a theoretical and a computational point of view.
The mathematical treatment of planning problems in public transit has made significant advances in the last decade. Among others, the classical problems of vehicle and crew scheduling can nowadays be solved on a routine basis using combinatorial optimization methods. This is not yet the case for problems that pertain to the design of public transit networks, and for the problems of operations control that address the implementation of a schedule in the presence of disturbances. The article gives a sketch of the state and important developments in these areas, and it addresses important challenges. The vision is that mathematical tools of computer aided scheduling (CAS) will soon play a similar role in the design and operation of public transport systems as CAD systems in manufacturing.
Ticket pricing in public transport usually takes a welfare or mnemonics maximization point of view. These approaches do not consider fairness in the sense that users of a shared infrastructure should pay for the costs that they generate. We propose an ansatz to determine fair ticket prices that combines concepts from cooperative game theory and integer programming. An application to pricing railway tickets for the intercity network of the Netherlands demonstrates that, in this sense, prices that are much fairer than standard ones can be computed in this way.
The airline crew scheduling problem deals with the construction of crew rotations in order to cover the flights of a given schedule at minimum cost. The problem involves complex rules for the legality and costs of individual pairings and base constraints for the availability of crews at home bases. A typical instance considers a planning horizon of one month and several thousand flights. We propose a column generation approach for solving airline crew scheduling problems that is based on a set partitioning model. We discuss algorithmic aspects such as the use of bundle techniques for the fast, approximate solution of linear programs, a pairing generator that combines Lagrangean shortest path and callback techniques, and a novel rapid branching'' IP heuristic. Computational results for a number of industrial instances are reported. Our approach has been implemented within the commercial crew scheduling system NetLine/Crew of Lufthansa Systems Berlin GmbH.
This article proposes a Lagrangean relaxation approach to solve integrated duty and vehicle scheduling problems arising in public transport. The approach is based on the proximal bundle method for the solution of concave decomposable functions, which is adapted for the approximate evaluation of the vehicle and duty scheduling components. The primal and dual information generated by the bundle method is used to guide a branch-and-bound type algorithm. Computational results for large-scale real-world integrated vehicle and duty scheduling problems with up to 1,500 timetabled trips are reported. Compared with the results of a classical sequential approach and with reference solutions, integrated scheduling offers remarkable potentials in savings and drivers' satisfaction.
Mobile telecommunication systems establish a large number of communication links with a limited number of available frequencies; reuse of the same or adjacent frequencies on neighboring links causes interference. The task to find an assignment of frequencies to channels with minimal interference is the frequency assignment problem. The frequency assignment problem is usually treated as a graph coloring problem where the number of colors is minimized, but this approach does not model interference minimization correctly. We give in this paper a new integer programming formulation of the frequency assignment problem, the orientation model, and develop a heuristic two-stage method to solve it. The algorithm iteratively solves an outer and an inner optimization problem. The outer problem decides for each pair of communication links which link gets the higher frequency and leads to an acyclic subdigraph problem with additional longest path restrictions. The inner problem to find an optimal assignment respecting an orientation leads to a min-cost flow problem.