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Decision support for railway crew planning

Train travel is considered to be a sustainable choice when going on a longer journey. For our society to fully reap the benefits of this means of transportation, careful resource planning is essential. For example, passengers need to be able to rely on the fact that trains are on time and train operators need to make efficient use of their vehicles and crew.

Control room, SJ. Photo credit SJ

Railways have an expensive infrastructure. The process of planning activities relevant to railways is highly complex and consists of many steps that have different planning horizons and involve various players. One part of this planning process is to schedule crew for trains that provide public railway transport. This research project therefore addresses the question how railway operators can handle disruptions and reschedule their crew efficiently. The long-term goal is to develop an optimisation-based decision support tool that can help planners to handle disruptions in a cost-efficient manner that also considers the schedules’ quality.

Central station, Stockholm. Photo credit SJ

Efficient solution within a limited amount of time

Since disruptions are handled online, it is important that the decision support tool is able to propose a new, high-quality plan quickly. From an optimisation perspective, this means that the implemented methods need to offer an efficient solution within a limited amount of time. For this purpose, we intend to develop matheuristic methods that utilise machine learning to choose a suitable search space.

This project is conducted within KAJT (Capacity in the Railway Traffic System), a research programme for improved railway system performance.

Project partners

SJ – a Swedish provider of public railway transport and owned by the Swedish government.

IVU – a German IT solutions provider for public transport and railway operators. They are active on a global scale and offer several optimisation-based decision support tools as part of their products.

TU Wien – The development of optimisation methods will be done in collaboration with Günther Raidl, in the Algorithms and Complexity group at TU Wien.

The Communications and Transport Systems (KTS) division at Linköping University – The interdisciplinary aspects of the project are addressed in dialogue with Anders Peterson at the Communications and Transport Systems division.

Contact

 
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Elina Rönnberg

Deputy Head of Department, Senior Associate Professor

Research areas

Working methodology for optimisation: Problem-Model-Calculations-Evaluation-Decision

Optimization Aims at Finding the Best Solutions to Difficult Problems

Activities in society and industry must be based on good decisions to be efficient and economical. Optimization is about identifying, formulating and solving large, complex problems.
Public transportation

Railway and public transport

The research group for railway and public transport is interested in developing models and methods, which describe the traffic and can be used as decision support tools.

Organisation

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Department of Science and Technology (ITN)

We research and teach in several technical and scientific disciplines in which our main areas are organic electronics, media, communications and logistics.
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Department of Mathematics (MAI)

The department conducts research in computational mathematics, mathematics and applied mathematics, mathematical statistics, and optimization. We provide courses to students in most degree programmes in mathematics, science and engineering.
Studenthuset on Campus Valla in Linköping

About LiU

Linköping University, LiU, offers innovative education and boundary-crossing research. The students are among the most desirable in the labour market and international rankings consistently place LiU as a leading global university.

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