Heuristic techniques for single line train scheduling

Optimising a train schedule on a single line track is known to be NP-Hard with respect to the number of conflicts in the schedule. This makes it difficult to determine optimum solutions to real life problems in reasonable time and raises the need for good heuristic techniques. The heuristics applied and compared in this paper are a local search heuristic with an improved neighbourhood structure, genetic algorithms, tabu search and two hybrid algorithms. When no time constraints are enforced on solution time, the genetic and hybrid algorithms were within five percent of the optimal solution for at least ninety percent of the test problems.