Heuristics for railway infrastructure saturation

Xavier Delorme (1, 2) , Joaquín Rodriguez (3) , Xavier Gandibleux (2)

1 INRETS - Institut National de Recherche sur les Transports et leur Sécurité
2 LAMIH - Laboratoire d'Automatique, de Mécanique et d'Informatique industrielles et Humaines - UMR 8201
3 INRETS/ESTAS - Évaluation des Systèmes de Transports Automatisés et leur Sécurité

This research concerns the problem of the evaluation of the railway infrastructure capacity. It is an important question when railway authorities have to choose between different infrastructure investment projects. We developped independently two heuristic approaches to solve the infrastructure saturation problem. The first is based on a constraint programming model which is solved using a greedy heuristic. The second approach identifies the saturation problem as a unicost set packing problem and its resolution is ensured by an adaption of GRASP metaheuristic. Currently, both resolution techniques are not in competition. The goal is to grasp the resolution ability of the heuristics and to analyse the kind of solutions produced. The Pierrefitte-Gonesse junction has been used as experimental support. A software environment allows to simulate several timetables involving TGV, Inter City and Freight trains.

Mots clés: Heuristic; Constraint Programming; GRASP; set packing problem; Railway planning problem

Domaines: Recherche opérationnelle [math.OC]

Xavier Delorme, Joaquín Rodriguez, Xavier Gandibleux. Heuristics for railway infrastructure saturation. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2001, ATMOS 2001, Algorithmic MeThods and Models for Optimization of RailwayS (Satellite Workshop of ICALP 2001), 50 (1), pp.39 - 53. ⟨10.1016/S1571-0661(04)00164-1⟩. ⟨hal-00462018⟩