Meta-heuristic and constraint-based approaches for single-line railway timetabling

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to recent advances in heuristic and metaheuristic procedures, arising from the areas of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, which are able to cope with large scale problems as those in single-line railway timetable optimization. Timetable design is a central problem in railway planning. In the basic timetabling problem, we are given a line plan as well as demand and infrastructure information. The goal is to compute timetables for passengers and cargo trains that satisfy infrastructure capacity and achieve multicriteria objectives: minimal passenger waiting time (both at changeovers and onboard), efficient use of trains, etc. Due to its central role in the planning process of railway scheduling, timetable design has many interfaces with other classical problems: line planning, vehicle scheduling, and delay management. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.