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Description: This paper proposes a highly integrated solution approach for rolling stock planning problems in the context of long distance passenger traffic between cities. The main contributions are a generic hypergraph-based mixed-integer programming model for the considered rolling stock rotation problem and an integrated algorithm for its solution. The newly developed algorithm is able to handle a large spectrum of industrial railway requirements, such as vehicle composition, maintenance constraints, infrastructure capacities, and regularity aspects. We show that our approach has the power to produce rolling stock rotations that can be implemented in practice. In this way, the rolling stock rotations at the largest German long distance operator Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr AG could be optimized by an automated system utilizing advanced mathematical programming techniques.

Description: Planning and operating railway transportation systems is an extremely hard task due to the combinatorial complexity of the underlying discrete optimization problems, the technical intricacies, and the immense size of the problem instances. Because of that, however, mathematical models and optimization techniques can result in large gains for both railway cus- tomers and operators, e.g., in terms of cost reductions or service quality improvements. In the last years a large and growing group of researchers in the OR community have devoted their attention to this domain devel- oping mathematical models and optimization approaches to tackle many of the relevant problems in the railway planning process. However, there is still a gap to bridge between theory and practice, with a few notable exceptions. In this paper we address three success stories, namely, long-term freight train routing (part I), mid-term rolling stock rotation planning (part II), and real-time train dispatching (part III). In each case, we describe real-life, successful implementations. We will dis- cuss the individual problem setting, survey the optimization literature, and focus on particular aspects addressed by the mathematical models. We demonstrate on concrete applications how mathematical optimization can support railway planning and operations. This gives proof that math- ematical optimization can support the planning of rolling stock resources. Thus, mathematical models and optimization can lead to a greater effi- ciency of railway operations and will serve as a powerful and innovative tool to meet recent challenges of the railway industry.

Description: The task of timetabling is to schedule the trips in a public transport system by determining periodic arrival and departure times at every station. The goal is to provide a service that is both attractive for passengers and can be operated economically. To date, timetable optimization is generally done with respect to fixed passenger routes, i.e., it is assumed that passengers do not respond to changes in the timetable. This is unrealistic and ignores potentially valuable degrees of freedom. We investigate in this paper periodic timetabling models with integrated passenger routing. We propose several models that differ in the allowed passenger paths and the objectives. We compare these models theoretically and report on computations on real-world instances for the city of Wuppertal.

Description: Duty rostering problems occur in different application contexts and come in different flavors. They give rise to very large scale integer programs which ypically have lots of solutions and extremely fractional LP relaxations. In such a situation, heuristics can be a viable algorithmic choice. We propose an mprovement method of the Lin-Kernighan type for the solution of duty rostering problems. We illustrate its versatility and solution quality on three different applications in public transit, vehicle routing, and airline rostering with a focus on the management of preferences, fairness, and fatigue, respectively.

Description: The task of periodic timetabling is to determine trip arrival and departure times in a public transport system such that travel and transfer times are minimized. This paper investigates periodic timetabling models with integrated passenger routing. We show that different routing models can have a huge influence on the quality of the entire system: Whatever metric is applied, the performance ratios of timetables w.r.t. different routing models can be arbitrarily large. Computations on a real-world instance for the city of Wuppertal substantiate the theoretical findings. These results indicate the existence of untapped optimization potentials that can be used to improve the efficiency of public transport systems by integrating passenger routing.

Description: Cycle inequalities play an important role in the polyhedral study of the periodic timetabling problem. We give the first pseudo-polynomial time separation algorithm for cycle inequalities, and we give a rigorous proof for the pseudo-polynomial time separability of the change-cycle inequalities. The efficiency of these cutting planes is demonstrated on real-world instances of the periodic timetabling problem.

Description: We present the problem of planning mobile tours of inspectors on German motorways to enforce the payment of the toll for heavy good trucks. This is a special type of vehicle routing problem with the objective to conduct as good inspections as possible on the complete network. In addition, we developed a personalized crew rostering model, to schedule the crews of the tours. The planning of daily tours and the rostering are combined in a novel integrated approach and formulated as a complex and large scale Integer Program. The main focus of this paper extends our previous publications on how different requirements for the rostering can be modeled in detail. The second focus is on a bi-criteria analysis of the planning problem to find the balance between the control quality and the roster acceptance. Finally, computational results on real-world instances show the practicability of our method and how different input parameters influence the problem complexity.

Description: Running and optimizing transportation systems give rise to very complex and large-scale optimization problems requiring innovative solution techniques and ideas from mathematical optimization, theoretical computer science, and operations research. Since 2000, the series of Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS) workshops brings together researchers and practitioners who are interested in all aspects of algorithmic methods and models for transportation optimization and provides a forum for the exchange and dissemination of new ideas and techniques. The scope of ATMOS comprises all modes of transportation. The 18th ATMOS workshop (ATMOS’18) was held in connection with ALGO’18 and hosted by Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, on August 23–24, 2018. Topics of interest were all optimization problems for passenger and freight transport, including, but not limited to, demand forecasting, models for user behavior, design of pricing systems, infrastructure planning, multi-modal transport optimization, mobile applications for transport, congestion modelling and reduction, line planning, timetable generation, routing and platform assignment, vehicle scheduling, route planning, crew and duty scheduling, rostering, delay management, routing in road networks, traffic guidance, and electro mobility. Of particular interest were papers applying and advancing techniques like graph and network algorithms, combinatorial optimization, mathematical programming, approximation algorithms, methods for the integration of planning stages, stochastic and robust optimization, online and real-time algorithms, algorithmic game theory, heuristics for real-world instances, and simulation tools. There were twenty-nine submissions from eighteen countries. All of them were reviewed by at least three referees in ninety-one reviews, among them five external ones, and judged on their originality, technical quality, and relevance to the topics of the workshop. Based on the reviews, the program committee selected sixteen submissions to be presented at the workshop (acceptance rate: 55%), which are collected in this volume in the order in which they were presented. Together, they quite impressively demonstrate the range of applicability of algorithmic optimization to transportation problems in a wide sense. In addition, Dennis Huisman kindly agreed to complement the program with an invited talk on Railway Disruption Management: State-of-the-art in practice and new research directions. Based on the reviews, Ralf Borndörfer, Marika Karbstein, Christian Liebchen, and Niels Lindner won the Best Paper Award of ATMOS’18 with their paper A simple way to compute the number of vehicles that Are required to operate a periodic timetable. In addition, we awarded Tomas Lidén the Best VGI Paper Award of ATMOS’18 for his paper Reformulations for railway traffic and maintenance planning. We would like to thank the members of the Steering Committee of ATMOS for giving us the opportunity to serve as Program Chairs of ATMOS’18, all the authors who submitted papers, Dennis Huisman for accepting our invitation to present an invited talk, the members of the Program Committee and the additional reviewers for their valuable work in selecting the papers appearing in this volume, our sponsors MODAL, TomTom, and VGIscience for their support of the prizes, and the local organizers for hosting the workshop as part of ALGO’18. We acknowledge the use of the EasyChair system for the great help in managing the submission and review processes, and Schloss Dagstuhl for publishing the proceedings of ATMOS’18 in its OASIcs series.

Description: We present a novel framework to mathematically describe the fare systems of local public transit companies. The model allows the computation of a provably cheapest itinerary even if prices depend on a number of parameters and non-linear conditions. Our approach is based on a ticket graph model to represent tickets and their relation to each other. Transitions between tickets are modeled via transition functions over partially ordered monoids and a set of symbols representing special properties of fares (e.g. surcharges). Shortest path algorithms rely on the subpath optimality property. This property is usually lost when dealing with complicated fare systems. We restore it by relaxing domination rules for tickets depending on the structure of the ticket graph. An exemplary model for the fare system of Mitteldeutsche Verkehrsbetriebe (MDV) is provided. By integrating our framework in the multi-criteria RAPTOR algorithm we provide a price-sensitive algorithm for the earliest arrival problem and assess its performance on data obtained from MDV. We discuss three preprocessing techniques that improve run times enough to make the algorithm applicable for real-time queries.

Description: For providing railway services the company's railway rolling stock is one if not the most important ingredient. It decides about the number of passenger or cargo trips the company can offer, about the quality a passenger experiences the train ride and it is often related to the image of the company itself. Thus, it is highly desired to have the available rolling stock in the best shape possible. Moreover, in many countries, as Germany where our industrial partner DB Fernverkehr AG (DBF) is located, laws enforce regular vehicle inspections to ensure the safety of the passengers. This leads to rolling stock optimization problems with complex rules for vehicle maintenance. This problem is well studied in the literature for example see [Maróti and Kroon, 2005; Gábor Maróti and Leo G. Kroon, 2007], or [Cordeau et al., 2001] for applications including vehicle maintenance. The contribution of this paper is a new algorithmic approach to solve the Rolling Stock Rotation Problem for the ICE high speed train fleet of DBF with included vehicle maintenance. It is based on a relaxation of a mixed integer linear programming model with an iterative cut generation to enforce the feasibility of a solution of the relaxation in the solution space of the original problem. The resulting mixed integer linear programming model is based on a hypergraph approach presented in [Ralf Borndörfer et al., 2015]. The new approach is tested on real world instances modeling different scenarios for the ICE high speed train network in Germany and compared to the approaches of [Reuther, 2017] that are in operation at DB Fernverkehr AG. The approach shows a significant reduction of the run time to produce solutions with comparable or even better objective function values.