Decision Support for Depot Planning in the Railway Industry



AbstractIn this project a prototype to increase the efficiency of depot planning in the railway industry has been developed. Depot planning or shunt planning is one of the final steps in the planning process of a passenger railway system. It focuses on the logistics within a station. Usually most of the shunt activities occur around the peak hours in the morning and afternoon and at the end of the day. The prototype is built as a decision support system, which helps the planners quickly making feasible and robust depot plans.

Several aspects of depot planning are examined in the project. The main problem is to determine the parking of train units on the shunt tracks. Different mathematical models and approaches are proposed for the problem. The models are solved by using mathematical software. In addition the prototype contains several methods to identify and correct possible conflicts between the timetable and the infrastructure prior to the solution procedure for the parking problem. The robustness of the depot plans are also taken into consideration in the solution process.

The efficiency of the prototype has been examined by small test cases. Furthermore the prototype has been applied to 6 depots at DSB S-tog. The experiments show that high-quality depot plans are typically found within few minutes of computation time.
KeywordsDepot planning, Shunt planning, Shunting, Decision Support System, Railway planning, Operations Research
TypeMaster's thesis [Industrial collaboration]
Year2006
PublisherInformatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
SeriesIMM-Thesis-2006-42
NoteSupervised by Assoc. Prof. Jesper Larsen, IMM.
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Operations Research