Optimal Real-Time Traffic Control in Metro Stations

Carlo Mannino () and Alessandro Mascis ()
Additional contact information
Carlo Mannino: Dip. Informatica e Sistemistica, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome 00185, Italy
Alessandro Mascis: Bombardier Transportation Italy S.P.A., 17047 Vado Ligure (SV), Italy

Operations Research, 2009, vol. 57, issue 4, 1026-1039

Abstract: Train movements across railway stations are still operated by human dispatchers. Motivated by an application provided by Azienda Trasporti Milanesi (ATM), the major Italian municipal transport company, we developed a real-time automated traffic control system to operate trains in metro stations. The system optimally controls the trains in a metro station by identifying a suitable routing and by establishing an optimum schedule of the performed operations. For each candidate routing an instance of the blocking, no-wait job-shop scheduling problem with convex costs is solved to optimality by branch and bound. A new, effective lower bound is developed to speed up the enumeration process. Computational testing in a real environment proved that the algorithm is able to solve relevant practical instances within the very tight time limit imposed by the application. The system has been in operation in the Milan metro since July 2007. To our knowledge, this is the first example of successful application of optimization methods to real-time traffic control in metro stations.

Keywords: transportation; routing; scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.1080.0642 (application/pdf)

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:inm:oropre:v:57:y:2009:i:4:p:1026-1039

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().