Railway Passenger Service Timetable Design

The aim of this paper is to analyze and to improve the current planning process of the passenger railway service. At first, the state-of-the-art in research is presented. Given the recent changes in legislature allowing competitors to enter the railway industry in Europe, also known as liberalization of railways, the current way of planning does not reflect the situation anymore. The original planning is based on the accessibility/mobility concept provided by one carrier, whereas the competitive market consists of several carriers that are driven by the profit. Moreover, the current practice does not define the ideal timetables (the initial most profitable timetables) and thus it is assumed that the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) use their historical data (train occupation, ticket sales, etc.) in order to construct the ideal timetables. For the first time in this field, we tackle the problem of ideal timetables in railway industry from the both points of view: TOCs’ and passengers’. We propose the Ideal Train Timetabling Problem (ITTP) to create a list of train timetables for each TOC separately. The ITTP approach incorporates the passenger demand in the planning and its aim is to maximize TOCs’ profits while keeping the passengers’ costs at a certain level. The outcome of the ITTP is the ideal timetables (including connections between the trains), which then serve as inputs for the traditional Train Timetabling Problem (TTP). We test our approach on the S-train network of Canton Vaud, Switzerland.