Optimizing High-Speed Railroad Timetable with Passenger and Station Service Demands: A Case Study in the Wuhan-Guangzhou Corridor

This paper aims to optimize high-speed railroad timetables for a corridor. We propose an integer programming model using a time-space network-based approach to consider passenger service demands, train scheduling, and station service demands simultaneously. A modified branch-and-price algorithm is used for the computation. This algorithm solves the linear relaxation of all nodes in a branch-and-bound tree using a column generation algorithm to derive a lower-bound value (LB) and derive an upper-bound value (UB) using a rapid branching strategy. The optimal solution is derived by iteratively updating the upper- and lower-bound values. Three acceleration strategies, namely, initial solution iteration, delayed constraints, and column removal, were designed to accelerate the computation. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm were tested using Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railroad data. The results show that the proposed model and algorithm can quickly reduce the defined cost function by 38.2% and improve the average travel speed by 10.7 km/h, which indicates that our proposed model and algorithm can effectively improve the quality of a constructed train timetable and the travel efficiency for passengers. Document type: Articl

A note on solving large-scale zero-one programming problems

A heuristic for solving large-scale zero-one programming problems is provided. The heuristic is based on the modifications made by H. Crowder et al. (1983) to the standard branch-and-bound strategy. First, the initialization is modified. The modification is only useful if the objective function values for the continuous and the zero-one programming problems are close to each other. Given the initialization, the branch-and-bound method is stopped when a feasible solution to the problem is found. The heuristic also uses the reduced costs to fix non-basic variables to 1 or 0. An example taken from achievement test construction illustrates the efficiency of the proposed heuristic. Several test construction problems were implemented and solved by the proposed heuristic for item banks with 400 items. Modifications were introduced in the LANDO computer program. A table illustrates that the central processing unit times for solving the zero-one programming problem were close to the times needed to solve the continuous problem

Cyclic best first search in branch-and-bound algorithms

In this dissertation, we study the application of a search strategy called cyclic best first search (CBFS) in branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithms. First, we solve a one machine scheduling problem with release and delivery times with the minimum makespan objective with a B&B algorithm using a variant of CBFS called CBFS-depth and a modified heuristic for finding feasible schedules. Second, we investigate the conditions of the search trees that may lead to CBFS-depth outperforming BFS in terms of the average number of nodes explored to prove optimality. Finally, we present a B&B algorithm using CBFS for a close-enough traveling salesman problem that demonstrates the benefit of using CBFS even if it does not improve the number of nodes explored to prove optimality. Overall, we show that using CBFS has a number of advantages to the performance of a B&B algorithm in comparison to the other search strategies given the right problems

B-LOG: A branch and bound methodology for the parallel execution of logic programs

We propose a computational methodology -"B-LOG"-, which offers the potential for an effective implementation of Logic Programming in a parallel computer. We also propose a weighting scheme to guide the search process through the graph and we apply the concepts of parallel "branch and bound" algorithms in order to perform a "best-first" search using an information theoretic bound. The concept of "session" is used to speed up the search process in a succession of similar queries. Within a session, we strongly modify the bounds in a local database, while bounds kept in a global database are weakly modified to provide a better initial condition for other sessions. We also propose an implementation scheme based on a database machine using "semantic paging", and the "B-LOG processor" based on a scoreboard driven controller

Models and Strategies for Variants of the Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Recently, a variety of constraint programming and Boolean satisfiability approaches to scheduling problems have been introduced. They have in common the use of relatively simple propagation mechanisms and an adaptive way to focus on the most constrained part of the problem. In some cases, these methods compare favorably to more classical constraint programming methods relying on propagation algorithms for global unary or cumulative resource constraints and dedicated search heuristics. In particular, we described an approach that combines restarting, with a generic adaptive heuristic and solution guided branching on a simple model based on a decomposition of disjunctive constraints. In this paper, we introduce an adaptation of this technique for an important subclass of job shop scheduling problems (JSPs), where the objective function involves minimization of earliness/tardiness costs. We further show that our technique can be improved by adding domain specific information for one variant of the JSP (involving time lag constraints). In particular we introduce a dedicated greedy heuristic, and an improved model for the case where the maximal time lag is 0 (also referred to as no-wait JSPs).Comment: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP 2011, Perugia : Italy (2011