A Decision Support System (DSS) for the Railway Scheduling Problem

Abstract

The recent deregulation occurred in the public railway sector in many parts of the world has increased the awareness of this sector of the need for quality service that must be offered to its customers. In this paper, we present a software system for solving and plotting the Single-Track Railway Scheduling Problem efficiently and quickly. The problem is formulated as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), which must be optimized. The solving process uses different stages to translate the problem into mathematical models, which are solved to optimality by means of mixed integer programming tools. The Decision Support System (DSS) we present allows the user to interactively specify the parameters of the problem, guarantees that constraints are satisfied and plots the optimized timetable obtained. © 2004 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.