Author(s)

Z Fu

Abstract

The recent operation practice and market survey in China railway show that passengers with different journey time have different favorite departure and arrival time windows. How to schedule train timetables according to this new market feature is of vital importance to the market share of railway passenger transport. However, in the computer-aided train scheduling systems developed recently, the determination of passenger train departure and arrival times depends fundamentally on the experience of train schedulers. This research is motivated by improving such method in the systems. The aim of this paper is to present some progress of the research. It will focus on the use of computer-aided techniques to optimize the departure and arrival time windows for all passenger trains on the network. The problem of scheduling train departure and arrival time windows to minimize the total passenger inconvenience is solved firstly. Given solutions found at this stage, they are used to determine a subset that minimizes the passenger cars needed to run the services. The techniques have been programmed and tested with the data from China railway. After inputting all data, it takes about 4 minutes on an ordinary 486 PC to output the results.

Keywords