Trains do not vanish: the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2014

Abstract

The ROADEF/EURO challenge is a contest jointly organized by the French Operational Research and Decision Aid society (ROADEF) and the European Operational Research society (EURO). The contest has appeared on a regular basis since 1999 and always concerns an applied optimization problem proposed by an industrial partner. The 2014 edition of the ROADEF/EURO challenge was led by the Innovation & Research department of SNCF, a global leader in passenger and freight transport services, and infrastructure manager of the French railway network. The objective of the challenge was to find the best way to store and move trains on large railway sites, between their arrivals and departures. Since trains never vanish and traffic continues to increase, in recent years some stations have been having real congestion issues. Train management in large railway sites is of high interest for SNCF, which is why it was submitted to the operations research community as the industrial problem for the 2014 edition of the ROADEF/EURO challenge. This paper introduces the special section of the Annals of Operations Research volume devoted to the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2014, as well as the methods of the finalist teams and their results.