A Lagrangian heuristic framework for a real-life integrated planning problem of railway transportation resources

Stéphane Dauzère-Pérès, David De Almeida, Olivier Guyon and Faten Benhizia

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2015, vol. 74, issue C, 138-150

Abstract: Train path (infrastructure), rolling stock and crew scheduling are three critical planning decisions in railway transportation. These resources are usually planned separately in a sequential process that typically starts from planning (1) train paths and goes further on to (2) rolling stock and (3) train drivers. Such a sequential approach helps to handle the complexity of the planning process and simplify the underlying mathematical models. However, it generates solutions with higher costs because the decisions taken at one step can drastically reduce the set of feasible solutions in the following steps. In this paper, we propose a Lagrangian heuristic framework to solve an integrated problem which globally and simultaneously considers the planning of two railway resources: Rolling stock units and train drivers. Based on a mixed integer linear programming formulation, this approach has two important characteristics in an industrial context: (i) It can tackle real-life integrated planning problems and (ii) the Lagrangian dual is solved by calling two proprietary software modules available at SNCF. Various relaxation schemes are analyzed. Moreover, coupling constraints are rewritten to improve the heuristic effectiveness. Numerical experiments on real-life instances illustrate the effectiveness of the Lagrangian heuristic, and the impact of various parameters is analyzed. Compared to a sequential approach, it leads to cost reductions and generates good solutions in a reasonable CPU time.

Keywords: Railway transportation; Integrated planning; Mixed integer programming; Lagrangian heuristic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261515000193
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transb:v:74:y:2015:i:c:p:138-150

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2015.01.008

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological is currently edited by Fred Mannering

More articles in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().