Mathematical solutions for solving periodic railway transportation (Q1036453)

Summary: Train scheduling is a significant issue in the railway industry. Over the last few years, numerous approaches and tools have been developed to compute railway scheduling. In this paper, we present a set of heuristics for a constraint-based train scheduling tool, which is a project in collaboration with the National Network of Spanish Railways (RENFE), Spain. We formulate train scheduling as a constraint optimization problem. Three heuristics are developed to speed up and direct the search toward suboptimal solutions in periodic train scheduling problems. The feasibility of our problem-oriented heuristics is confirmed with experimentation using real-life data. The results show that these techniques enable MIP solvers such as LINGO and ILOG Concert Technology (CPLEX) to terminate earlier with good solutions.