The Railway Line Frequency and Size Setting Problem

[EN] The problem studied in this paper takes as input data a set of lines forming a railway network, and an origin¿destination (OD) matrix. The OD pairs may use either the railway network or an alternative transportation mode. The objective is to determine the frequency/headway of each line as well as its number of carriages, so that the net profit of the railway network is maximized. We propose a mixed integer non-linear programming formulation for this problem. Because of the computational intractability of this model, we develop four algorithms: a mixed integer linear programming (MIP) model, a MIP-based iterative algorithm, a shortest-path based algorithm, and a local search. These four algorithms are tested and compared over a set of randomly generated instances. An application over a case study shows that only the local search heuristic is capable of dealing with large instances.This research was partly funded by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under Grant 2015-06189, by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain)/FEDER under projects MTM2012-37048, MTM2015-67706-P and DPI2012-36243-C02-01, and by Junta de Andalucía (Spain)/FEDER under excellence project P10-FQM-5849. Part of this research was done while Federico Perea was enjoying a research visit to CIRRELT, funded by the Universitat Politècnica de València, under program PAID-00-15. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to the referees for their valuable comments.De-Los-Santos, A.; Laporte, G.; Mesa, JA.; Perea Rojas Marcos, F. (2017). The Railway Line Frequency and Size Setting Problem. Public Transport. 9(1-2):33-53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-017-0154-2S335391-2Albrecht T (2009) Automated timetable design for demand-oriented service on suburban railways. Public Transport 1(1):5–20Caprara A, Kroon L, Monaci M, Peeters M, Toth P (2007) Passenger Railway optimization. In: Barnhart C, Laporte G (eds) Handbooks in operations research and management science, vol 14. Transportation, chapter 3. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp 129–187De-Los-Santos A, Laporte G, Mesa J, Perea F (2014) Simultaneous frequency and capacity setting in uncapacitated metro lines in presence of a competing mode. Transp Res Proc 3:289–298Desaulniers G, Hickman M (2007) Public transport. In: Barnhart C, Laporte G (eds) Handbook in operations research and management science, vol 14, Transportation, chapter 2. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp 69–127Gallo M, Montella B, D’Acierno L (2011) The transit network design problem with elastic demand and internalisation of external costs: An application to rail frequency optimisation. Transp Res Part C Emerg Technol 19(6):1276–1305Laporte G, Marín A, Mesa JA, Perea F (2011) Designing robust rapid transit networks with alternative routes. J Adv Transp 45(1):54–65Marín A, García-Ródenas R (2009) Location of infrastructure in urban railway networks. Comput Oper Res 36(5):1461–1477Michaelis M, Schöbel A (2009) Integrating line planning, timetable, and vehicle scheduling: a customer oriented heuristic. Public Transport 1(3):211–232Perea F, Mesa JA, Laporte G (2014) Adding a new station and a road link to a road-rail network in the presence of modal competition. Transp Res Part B Methodol 68:1–16Schmidt M, Schöbel A (2015) The complexity of integrating passenger routing decisions in public transportation models. Networks 65(3):228–243Schmidt ME (2014) Integrating routing decisions in public transportation problems. Springer, New YorkSchöbel A (2012) Line planning in public transportation. OR Spectrum 34:491–510van Oort N, van Nes R (2009) Regularity analysis for optimizing urban transit network design. Public Transport 1(2):155–168Vuchic VR (2005) Urban transit: operations, planning, and economics. Wiley, Hoboken, New Jerse

Towards a Testbed for Dynamic Vehicle Routing Algorithms

Since modern transport services are becoming more flexible, demand-responsive, and energy/cost efficient, there is a growing demand for large-scale microscopic simulation platforms in order to test sophisticated routing algorithms. Such platforms have to simulate in detail, not only the dynamically changing demand and supply of the relevant service, but also traffic flow and other relevant transport services. This paper presents the DVRP extension to the open-source MATSim simulator. The extension is designed to be highly general and customizable to simulate a wide range of dynamic rich vehicle routing problems. The extension allows plugging in of various algorithms that are responsible for continuous re-optimisation of routes in response to changes in the system. The DVRP extension has been used in many research and commercial projects dealing with simulation of electric and autonomous taxis, demand-responsive transport, personal rapid transport, free-floating car sharing and parking search

Integrating big data into a sustainable mobility policy 2.0 planning support system

It is estimated that each of us, on a daily basis, produces a bit more than 1 GB of digital content through our mobile phone and social networks activities, bank card payments, location-based positioning information, online activities, etc. However, the implementation of these large data amounts in city assets planning systems still remains a rather abstract idea for several reasons, including the fact that practical examples are still very strongly services-oriented, and are a largely unexplored and interdisciplinary field; hence, missing the cross-cutting dimension. In this paper, we describe the Policy 2.0 concept and integrate user generated content into Policy 2.0 platform for sustainable mobility planning. By means of a real-life example, we demonstrate the applicability of such a big data integration approach to smart cities planning process. Observed benefits range from improved timeliness of the data and reduced duration of the planning cycle to more informed and agile decision making, on both the citizens and the city planners end. The integration of big data into the planning process, at this stage, does not have uniform impact across all levels of decision making and planning process, therefore it should be performed gradually and with full awareness of existing limitations

On green routing and scheduling problem

The vehicle routing and scheduling problem has been studied with much interest within the last four decades. In this paper, some of the existing literature dealing with routing and scheduling problems with environmental issues is reviewed, and a description is provided of the problems that have been investigated and how they are treated using combinatorial optimization tools

Bus rapid transit

Effective public transit is central to development. For the vast majority of developing city residents, public transit is the only practical means to access employment, education, and public services, especially when such services are beyond the viable distance of walking or cycling. Unfortunately, the current state of public transit services in developing cities often does little to serve the actual mobility needs of the population. Bus services are too often unreliable, inconvenient and dangerous. In response, transport planners and public officials have sometimes turned to extremely costly mass transit alternatives such as rail-based metros. Due to the high costs of rail infrastructure, cities can only construct such systems over a few kilometres in a few limited corridors. The result is a system that does not meet the broader transport needs of the population. Nevertheless, the municipality ends up with a long-term debt that can affect investment in more pressing areas such as health, education, water, and sanitation. However, there is an alternative between poor public transit service and high municipal debt. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) can provide high-quality, metro-like transit service at a fraction of the cost of other options. This document provides municipal officials, non-governmental organizations, consultants, and others with an introduction to the concept of BRT as well as a step-by-step process for successfully planning a BRT system

Optimal Alignments for Designing Urban Transport Systems: Application to Seville

The achievement of some of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the recent 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has drawn the attention of many countries towards urban transport networks. Mathematical modeling constitutes an analytical tool for the formal description of a transportation system whereby it facilitates the introduction of variables and the definition of objectives to be optimized. One of the stages of the methodology followed in the design of urban transit systems starts with the determination of corridors to optimize the population covered by the system whilst taking into account the mobility patterns of potential users and the time saved when the public network is used instead of private means of transport. Since the capture of users occurs at stations, it seems reasonable to consider an extensive and homogeneous set of candidate sites evaluated according to the parameters considered (such as pedestrian population captured and destination preferences) and to select subsets of stations so that alignments can take place. The application of optimization procedures that decide the sequence of nodes composing the alignment can produce zigzagging corridors, which are less appropriate for the design of a single line. The main aim of this work is to include a new criterion to avoid the zigzag effect when the alignment is about to be determined. For this purpose, a curvature concept for polygonal lines is introduced, and its performance is analyzed when criteria of maximizing coverage and minimizing curvature are combined in the same design algorithm. The results show the application of the mathematical model presented for a real case in the city of Seville in Spain.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad MTM2015-67706-

Approaching delivery as a service

This paper explores the new logistics business model of Delivery as a Service, a concept aiming at a more efficient, fast and customer-oriented practice, linking IT solution development, urban logistics operations, supply chain efficiency and new business models. Delivery as a Service (DaaS) is defined as a service-oriented delivery and business processes in line with customer expectations and needs in the on-demand economy. The approach of this paper is an industry report based on evidence collected in multiple exploratory European projects integrating ambitious and strategic findings on Internet of Things, urban planning, consolidation centres, transport optimisation, and clean vehicle use. It contributes to a future scenario of urban logistics business models

Dynamic Collection Scheduling Using Remote Asset Monitoring: Case Study in the UK Charity Sector

Remote sensing technology is now coming onto the market in the waste collection sector. This technology allows waste and recycling receptacles to report their fill levels at regular intervals. This reporting enables collection schedules to be optimized dynamically to meet true servicing needs in a better way and so reduce transport costs and ensure that visits to clients are made in a timely fashion. This paper describes a real-life logistics problem faced by a leading UK charity that services its textile and book donation banks and its high street stores by using a common fleet of vehicles with various carrying capacities. Use of a common fleet gives rise to a vehicle routing problem in which visits to stores are on fixed days of the week with time window constraints and visits to banks (fitted with remote fill-monitoring technology) are made in a timely fashion so that the banks do not become full before collection. A tabu search algorithm was developed to provide vehicle routes for the next day of operation on the basis of the maximization of profit. A longer look-ahead period was not considered because donation rates to banks are highly variable. The algorithm included parameters that specified the minimum fill level (e.g., 50%) required to allow a visit to a bank and a penalty function used to encourage visits to banks that are becoming full. The results showed that the algorithm significantly reduced visits to banks and increased profit by up to 2.4%, with the best performance obtained when the donation rates were more variable

Operations research in passenger railway transportation

In this paper, we give an overview of state-of-the-art OperationsResearch models and techniques used in passenger railwaytransportation. For each planning phase (strategic, tactical andoperational), we describe the planning problems arising there anddiscuss some models and algorithms to solve them. We do not onlyconsider classical, well-known topics such as timetabling, rollingstock scheduling and crew scheduling, but we also discuss somerecently developed topics as shunting and reliability oftimetables.Finally, we focus on several practical aspects for each of theseproblems at the largest Dutch railway operator, NS Reizigers.passenger railway transportation;operation research;planning problems

Public transit route planning through lightweight linked data interfaces

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