Approaches to modeling train scheduling problems as job-shop problems with blocking constraints

Julia Lange () and Frank Werner ()
Additional contact information
Julia Lange: Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg
Frank Werner: Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg

Journal of Scheduling, 2018, vol. 21, issue 2, No 5, 207 pages

Abstract: Abstract The problem of scheduling a set of trains traveling through a given railway network consisting of single tracks, sidings and stations is considered. For every train a fixed route and travel times, an earliest departure time at the origin and a desired arrival time at the destination are given. A feasible schedule has to be determined which minimizes total tardiness of all trains at their destinations. This train scheduling problem is modeled as a job-shop scheduling problem with blocking constraints, where jobs represent trains and machines constitute tracks or track sections. Four MIP formulations without time-indexed variables are developed based on two different transformation approaches of parallel tracks and two different types of decision variables leading to job-shop scheduling problems with or without routing flexibility. A computational study is made on hard instances with up to 20 jobs and 11 machines to compare the MIP models in terms of total tardiness values, formulation size and computation time.

Keywords: Train scheduling; Job-shop; Total tardiness; Blocking; Mixed integer programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10951-017-0526-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jsched:v:21:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s10951-017-0526-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10951

DOI: 10.1007/s10951-017-0526-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Scheduling is currently edited by Edmund Burke and Michael Pinedo

More articles in Journal of Scheduling from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().