Optimising the travel time of a line plan

The line planning problem that arises in the planning of a passenger railway involves selecting a number of lines from a potential pool to provide sufficient passenger capacity, meeting operational requirements, while optimising some measure of line quality. We model, and solve, the problem of minimising the average passenger system time, including frequency-dependent estimates for switching between lines in collaboration with Danish State Railways (DSB).

We present a multi-commodity flow formulation for the problem of freely routing passengers, coupled to discrete line-frequency decisions selecting lines from a predefined pool. The performance of the developed methodology is analysed on instances taken from the suburban commuter network, DSB S-tog, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

We show that the proposed approach yields line plans that are superior from both an operator and a passenger perspective to line plans that have been implemented in practice.