Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
The periodic event scheduling problem (PESP) is a well studied problem known as intrinsically hard, but with important applications mainly for finding good timetables in public transportation. In this paper we consider PESP in public transportation, but in a reduced version (r-PESP) in which the driving and waiting times of the vehicles are fixed to their lower bounds. This results in a still NP-hard problem which has less variables, since only one variable determines the schedule for a whole line. We propose a formulation for r-PESP which is based on scheduling the lines. This enables us on the one hand to identify a finite candidate set and an exact solution approach. On the other hand, we use this formulation to derive a matching-based heuristic for solving PESP. Our experiments on close to real-world instances from LinTim show that our heuristic is able to compute competitive timetables in a very short runtime.
@InProceedings{patzold_et_al:OASIcs.ATMOS.2016.1,
author = {P\"{a}tzold, Julius and Sch\"{o}bel, Anita},
title = {{A Matching Approach for Periodic Timetabling}},
booktitle = {16th Workshop on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2016)},
pages = {1:1--1:15},
series = {Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-021-7},
ISSN = {2190-6807},
year = {2016},
volume = {54},
editor = {Goerigk, Marc and Werneck, Renato F.},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.ATMOS.2016.1},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-65251},
doi = {10.4230/OASIcs.ATMOS.2016.1},
annote = {Keywords: PESP, Timetabling, Public Transport, Matching, Finite Dominating Set}
}