Capacity Consumption Analysis Using Heuristic Solution Method for Under Construction Railway Routes

In this paper, a compressed timetable is generated to calculate capacity consumption for under construction railway routes using an optimization approach. Since the detailed timetable for under construction routes does not exist, the timetable is not required in the applied model. The model generates a compressed timetable based on UIC 406 method. The capacity consumption problem is formulated as a multicommodity network design model on a space-discrete time network. A local branching heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the model. The main idea underlining the local branching algorithm is the utilization of a general mixed integer programming solver to explore neighborhoods and locally search around the best-known solution by employing tree search. The parameters of the algorithm are tuned by using design of experiments. The proposed method is implemented in Iran Railways and the results are reported. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014