We are delighted to announce the talk given by Han Hoogeveen (Utrecht
University). The title is "Planning shunting operations at railway
hubs". The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, November 26 at
14:00 UTC.
See website for zoom link.
You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as
well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A
The abstract follows.
At night, trains are parked on shunting yards. Here cleaning and small
maintenance takes place, after which the trains have to leave in the
morning at the planned departure time and in the desired composition,
which may require splitting and coupling during their stay at the yard.
As NS (Dutch Railways) continues to expand its fleet while the available
yard space remains fixed, the shunting yards are becoming increasingly
congested, with occupation rates reaching up to 90%. Consequently,
planning all train movements and related activities has become a complex
challenge. In this talk, I will discuss the main challenges encountered
in planning the shunting yards and the algorithms that we have designed
to tackle these problems. First, I want to discuss the shunting problem
on a single yard. We solve this problem using local search; our
algorithm is the first one that is capable of solving real-world problem
instances of the complete shunting and scheduling problem. Next, I want
to extend the problem to the entire station area, which requires that we
distribute the trains over two (or more) shunting yards, while avoiding
interference with through traffic and respecting the capacity of the
separate shunting yards. The main difficulty here is that the capacity
of the shunting yard is not known; we use data analysis to estimate it.
Finally, I want to discuss the problem of assigning shunting tasks to
train drivers. This is a variant of the technician routing problem
without skills, but with synchronization. We have developed an algorithm
for this that is based on a novel decomposition approach.
The next talk in our series will be:
Laurent Houssin (ENAC, Université de Toulouse) | December 10 | Flow-shop
and job-shop robust scheduling problems with budgeted uncertainty
For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/
With kind regards
Zdenek Hanzalek, Michael Pinedo and Guohua Wan