VIPES - Reliable and Integrated Planning of Circulations and Shifts in Railway Systems

Existing powerful operations research methods enable the creation of highly efficient plans for deploying personnel and vehicles in rail transport. In the implementation, however, delays and breakdowns mean that the plans can often not be executed as intended. To meet this challenge, in the project VIPES, methods are developed to design schedules for traction units and shift schedules for train crews in such a way that they are efficient and reliable at the same time. This is to be made possible by intelligent interaction between optimization and simulation. Machine learning techniques are used to identify efficient and reliable solution structures, which will be used in the solution procedures.