Laura Galli, University of Bologna
Abstract:
Several planning problems arising in the railways have been tackled using Operational Research (OR) techniques.
An important problem is the 'Train Routing Problem', which is the problem of assigning inbound and outbound routes to trains in a given railway station, for a fixed (or nearly fixed) timetable. This optimisation step follows the timetabling phase and defines a detailed routing of the trains through the station according to its layout. The train routing task can be remarkably difficult to solve, especially when the railway station has a complex topology, as is the case for many main European stations. This talk will introduce a very general version of train routing, inspired by the Italian case, and will show how OR techniques were used to find solutions that were significantly better than those obtained by the Italian Infrastructure Manager. The talk will also introduce a possible robust counterpart for the problem, applicable to scenarios with right-hand-side uncertainty.