This paper introduces the Passenger-Oriented Timetabling problem with flexible frequencies (POT-flex) in the context of railway planning problems. POT-flex aims at creating feasible railway timetables minimising total perceived passenger travel time. The contribution of the POT-flex lies in its relaxation of the generally adopted assumption that line frequencies should be a fixed part of the input. Instead, we consider flexible line frequencies, encompassing a minimum and maximum frequency per line, allowing the timetabling model to decide on optimal line frequencies to obtain better solutions using fewer train services per line. We develop a mixed-integer programming formulation for POT-flex based on the Passenger-Oriented Timetabling (POT) formulation of [Polinder et al., 2021] and compare the performance of the new formulation against the POT formulation on three instances. We find that POT-flex allows to find feasible timetables in instances containing bottlenecks, and show improvements of up to 2% on the largest instance tested. These improvements highlight the cost that fixed line frequencies can have on timetabling.
Fewer Trains for Better Timetables: The Price of Fixed Line Frequencies in the Passenger-Oriented Timetabling Problem
2023-08-31
18 pages , 1315406 byte
OASIcs, Vol. 115, 23rd Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2023), pages 8:1-8:18
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Service-Oriented Line Planning and Timetabling for Passenger Trains
Online Contents | 2013
|Service-Oriented Line Planning and Timetabling for Passenger Trains
British Library Online Contents | 2013
|Adjusting Train Timetables Based on Passenger Flow for Cross-Line Trains
Transportation Research Record | 2023
|Passenger centric train timetabling problem
Online Contents | 2016
|JRC2012-74137 Sequence Optimization for Timetabling High Frequency Passenger Trains
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2012
|