Train Routing

Railway companies face the very important problem of minimizing the number of trains needed to fulfill a given schedule of train routes. This problem, known as the fleet size, rolling stock rostering, or vehicle routing problem, is very hard to solve efficiently in a realistic setting. Minimizing the number of locomotives and cars needed to fulfill a periodic schedule can drastically reduce costs of a railway company.

Train-Routing solves this problem. It concerns a large set of constraints and requirements and computes in a small number of seconds an almost optimal number of trains needed and the routes of locomotives and cars. Some of these requirements are: several different train unit types, different station turn around times, and a lot of different maintenance requirements.

The main objective of Train-Routing is minimizing the total costs of a rolling stock rostering. In order to work properly Train-Routing needs as input a schedule, information about train units, and a set of three different cost functions: fixed costs, costs per ride, and maintenance costs.

All input and output is read from and written into a standard database. An additional stand-alone viewer reads this database and visualizes the rolling stock rostering in a user-friendly and intuitive way.