Automated Generation and Optimization of Public Railway and Rail Freight Transport Time Tables

Railway traffic now and in future faces ever-growing challenges. On the one hand, infrastructure measures must be planned and in the medium respectively long term corresponding operating programs have to be generated. On the other hand, in the short term economical and political reasons exert increasing influence on the requirements of timetabling as well. Hence, they can hardly be efficiently handled with manual effort. Consequently, it exists the need for highly optimized, automated algorithms and its corresponding intelligent conjunction. A state-of-the-art realization is reflected in the software system TAKT, which is developed in close cooperation with the German railway company DB Netz AG. The implementation offers a complete new approach to solve the problems like computing conflict-free, optimized time tables or searching, optimizing and maximizing rail freight transport train paths based on an existing operating program. In this work, the different program component and their interactions among each other will be presented and discussed.