Planning at railway hubs

The NS has to manage a large fleet of train units. During the non-rush hours, the trains have to be parked, cleaned, inspected and coupled before they are used again in the next rush hour. Due to the limited space on the service locations, this results in a hard scheduling problem for the NS. We developed a local search algorithm, which is the first algorithm that can find a feasible schedule within a reasonable amount of time. We also investigated measures to improve the robustness of the schedules and included personnel scheduling. NS developed our algorithms further and plans to take it into operation in the coming years.

Researchers

Roel van den Broek

Academic supervisors

Dr. Han Hoogeveen, Dr. ir. Marjan van den Akker

Grant funding agency and (co-)funding non-academic partners

NS