Real time management of a metro rail terminus

This paper addresses a scheduling problem arising in the real time management of a metro rail terminus. It mainly consists in routing incoming trains through the station and scheduling their departures with the objective of optimizing punctuality and regularity of train service. The purpose of this work is to develop an automated train traffic control system, able to directly implement most traffic control actions, without the authorization of the local area manager. The scheduling problem is modeled as a bicriteria job shop scheduling problem with additional constraints. The two objective functions, in lexicographical order, are the minimization of tardiness/earliness and the headway optimization. The problem is solved in two steps. At first a heuristic builds a feasible solution by considering the first objective function. Then the regularity is optimized without deteriorating the first objective function. Computational results show that the system is able to manage the terminus very efficiently. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.