Article ID: | iaor20031898 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 50 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 851 |
End Page Number: | 861 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2002 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Fischetti Matteo, Toth Paolo, Caprara Alberto |
Keywords: | transportation: rail, networks |
The train timetabling problem aims at determining a periodic timetable for a set of trains that does not violate track capacities and satisfies some operational constraints. In particular, we concentrate on the problem of a single, one-way track linking two major stations, with a number of intermediate stations in between. Each train connects two given stations along the track (possibly different from the two major stations) and may have to stop for a minimum time in some of the intermediate stations. Trains can overtake each other only in correspondence of an intermediate station, and a minimum time interval between two consecutive departures and arrivals of trains in each station is specified. In this paper, we propose a graph theoretic formulation for the problem using a directed multigraph in which nodes correspond to departures/arrivals at a certain station at a given time instant. This formulation is used to derive an integer linear programming model that is relaxed in a Lagrangian way. A novel feature of our model is that the variables in the relaxed constraints are associated only with nodes (as opposed to arcs) of the aforementioned graph. This allows a considerable speed-up in the solution of the relaxation. The relaxation is embedded within a heuristic algorithm which makes extensive use of the dual information assciated with the Lagrangian multipliers. We report extensive computational results on real-world instances provided from Ferrovie dello Stato SpA, the Italian railway company, and from Ansaldo Segnalamento Ferroviario SpA.