An exact solution approach for prioritised and nonprioritized trains scheduling problem

Abstract: We deal with a new decision problem, namely, the problem of scheduling prioritized trains and nonprioritised trains in a railway network. The difference between these two types of trains is the no-wait constraint, which should be satisfied by the prioritized trains. However, the nonprioritised trains may remain on the current section until a section on the routing becomes available. Our objective is to find a feasible scheduling that minimizes the total tardiness. It has been showed that this problem is NP−hard, and it can be considered as a job shop scheduling problem with blocking and no-wait constraints. A mathematical integer programming formulation is given, and numerical experiments are provided for evaluating the proposed approach. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first who deal this trains scheduling problem with total tardiness criterion, which is the main contribution in this paper.

Keywords: Trains scheduling, Priorities, Blocking, Job shop, No-wait, Mathematical model.

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004094

Cite this paper:

​