Section: New Results

Railway Time Tabling Optimization

Participants : François Fages, David Fournier, Sylvain Soliman.

Sustainable development is a key issue for our society. Optimization of resources, energy and costs (as admirably done in living organisms) has thus grown significantly over years to become a major field in industry. In collaboration with General Electric Transportation France which is a key-actor in the field of transportation all around the world, we investigate energy reduction for train and metro service providers through time tabling optimization. In [31] , we describe and compare different optimization methods to reduce energy in mass rapid transits (MRT). Most of the literature deals with a special problematic arising in train services: the maximum traction energy. They show that for reducing costs and energy consumption, one method is the reduction of the peak energy over a time period. This objective function has been chosen for this study and the thesis depicts how to implement it on different paradigms, such as mixed-integer linear programming, constraint programming or local search. We conclude on promising approaches in terms of optimization methods for time tabling computation and real-time scheduling.