The train timetabling problem considered is to find conflict free routes for a set of trains in a given railway network so that certain time window conditions are satisfied. We deal with the very large scale problem of constructing such timetables for the German railway network. A number of restrictions on different train types like freight trains or passenger trains have to be observed, e.g., ...

When timetabling experts are faced with a new timetabling problem, they usually develop a very specialised and optimised solution for this new underlying problem. One disadvantage of this strategy is that even slight changes of the problem description often cause a complete redesign of data structures and algorithms. Furthermore, other timetabling problems cannot be fit to the data structures p...

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....

This paper proposes a mathematical approach that can increase energy saving in timetables. The energy-efficient timetabling method, we use, maintains the planned traveling time between stations, but coordinates the train departure times at the starting station from current timetable.We formulate this problem as a multi-criteria mixed integer programming to minimize the peak energy and simultane...

This paper presents our work on analysing high level heuristics within a graph based hyper-heuristic framework. Local search based methods (Tabu Search and steepest descent method) are compared as the high level heuristics within the graph based hyper-heuristic framework and the analysis of their neighborhood structures and performance on the high level landscape is carried out. An iterated ste...

Timetabling is a typical application of constraint programming whose task is to allocate activities to slots in available resources respecting various constraints like precedence and capacity. In this paper we present a basic concept, a constraint model, and a solution algorithm for interactive timetabling. Interactive timetabling combines automated timetabling (the computer allocates the activ...

We address the problem of generating a global detailed conflict-free railway schedule for a given set of train lines and frequencies and we propose a decomposition of the railway network into condensation and compensation zones in order to solve the train scheduling problem. Condensation zones lie in the proximity of main stations, where available capacity is limited and trains are therefore re...

General Optimization Methods Mathematical Programming, Constraint Programming, Heuristics Problem Specific Algorithms (Dynamic Programming, Branch and Bound) Scheduling Single and Parallel Machine Models Flow Shops and Flexible Flow Shops Job Shops Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Timetabling Interval Scheduling, Reservations Educational Timetabling Workforce and Employee Timetabling Tra...