Enhancing the interaction of railway timetabling and line planning with infrastructure awareness

Planning a railway system is done in multiple stages that are typically intractable to optimize an integrated manner. This work develops novel iterative approach tackle two of these jointly: line planning and timetabling. Compared existing approaches iteratively ban whole conflicting plan when the timetable found infeasible, our method can accurately identify smallest set incompatible services. Besides, by efficiently exploiting available infrastructure, accounts for all possible routing options trains, feature commonly neglected reduce complexity but helps gaining feasibility. Using real data from company Switzerland, we find (i) practical solving real-life instances, (ii) order magnitude faster than benchmarks, (iii) able solve more instances. Our insights shed light on necessity considering infrastructure banning conflicts rather plans joint timetabling problem. • We study problem railways. propose new bans lines. By enabling train routing, model exploits capacity. assess benefits theoretically numerically outperforms benchmark magnitude.