Scheduling Railway Traffic at a Construction Site

Peter Brucker , Silvia Heitmann , Sigrid Knust

The paper is published: OR Spectrum 24 (2002), 19-30

MSC 2000

90B35 Scheduling theory, deterministic

Abstract
We consider the problem of rescheduling trains in the case where one track of a railway section consisting of two tracks in opposing directions is closed due to construction activities. After presenting an appropriate model for this situation we derive a polynomial algorithm for the subproblem of finding an optimal schedule if the subsequences for both directions outside the construction site are fixed. Based on this algorithm we propose a local search procedure for the general problem and report test results for some real world instances.