Optimization of Passenger Line Planning in Railway

The passenger line planning is a process of strategic long-term decision-making problem in the field of railway passenger planning. A line is a direct railway connection between two stations. A line is characterized by the origin and destination stations, the frequency per day, the route between these two stations, and the intermediate stops at passing railway stations. Various mathematical models have been proposed for passenger line planning problem, and different solution methods have been provided so far. Two solution methods based on column generation algorithm and genetic algorithm have been proposed in this article, the first alghorithm is defined in one master problem and two sub problems. Since the solution provided by column generation method is not of the integer number type, a heuristic algoadrithm has been proposed here for converting the results to integer numbers. The objective function for line planning problem in this article is to maximize the number of direct passengers. Direct passengers are the passengers that can travel from their origin station to their destination station without having to change trains. Results on the proposed solution methods, for twirty two test problems, are compared to those of solutions obtained via CPLEX software, one of the well-known solvers for solving both linear and mix integer programming problems using branch and bound algorithm. Results show that the proposed solution methods have high performance and accuracy.