Integrated Optimization of Rolling Stock Rotations for Intercity Railways

This paper proposes a highly integrated solution approach for rolling stock planning problems in the context of long distance passenger traffic between cities. The main contributions are a generic hypergraph‐based mixed‐integer programming model for the considered rolling stock rotation problem and an integrated algorithm for its solution. The newly developed algorithm is able to handle a large spectrum of industrial railway requirements, such as vehicle composition, maintenance constraints, infrastructure capacities, and regularity aspects. We show that our approach has the power to produce rolling stock rotations that can be implemented in practice. In this way, the rolling stock rotations at the largest German long distance operator Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr AG could be optimized by an automated system utilizing advanced mathematical programming techniques.