Abstract
We investigate the impact of coordinating the timetable and the crew schedule in an operational freight railway system. Usually, those problems are solved sequentially—resulting in suboptimal schedules for train drivers due to large idle times between two train rides. We seek to coordinate the timetable and the crew schedule on the operational level by adding flexibility to the timetable. We introduce small time windows that allow to shift entire trains forwards and backwards by discrete time periods. We present a mathematical model and solve it with a column generation heuristic. We test our model on three real datasets of a major European Freight Railway Operator and show that significant reduction in idle time and cost can be achieved.
Highlights
Freight railway operators must coordinate their resources to transport their customers’ goods
At a major European Freight Railway Operator (EFRO), who initiated our research, train drivers frequently wait at train stations in order to drive the train back to their home depot. These long waiting times can be attributed to the underlying timetables and not to the engine schedule, such that these cannot be reduced by integrating the engine scheduling problem with the crew scheduling problem, but require a coordina‐ tion between the timetable and the crew schedule
Our findings indicate that the coordination of the timetable and the crew schedule by small time shifts already results in significant idle time reductions of up to 27% and cost reductions of up to 9% depending on the specific dataset
Summary
Freight railway operators must coordinate their resources (track capacity, engines and train drivers) to transport their customers’ goods. At a major European Freight Railway Operator (EFRO), who initiated our research, train drivers frequently wait at train stations in order to drive the train back to their home depot These long waiting times can be attributed to the underlying timetables and not to the engine schedule, such that these cannot be reduced by integrating the engine scheduling problem with the crew scheduling problem, but require a coordina‐ tion between the timetable and the crew schedule. Customers requesting short notice trains usually require quick confirmations, such that these trains are inserted sequentially into the timetable over a period of up to several weeks This large number of additional trains destroys the coordination between the annual timetable and crew schedule and makes an operational coordination necessary.
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