[Scheduling seminar] Hoogeveen, J.A. (Utrecht University) | November 26 | Planning shunting operations at railway hubs

Dear scheduling researcher,

We are delighted to announce the talk given by Han Hoogeveen (Utrecht 
University). The title is "Planning shunting operations at railway 
hubs". The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, November 26 at 
14:00 UTC.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/97711129359?pwd=8bUbSE56gVa8UilLUasEbVT8QX2HnU.1
Meeting ID: 977 1112 9359
Passcode: 599095

You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as 
well:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A

The abstract follows.
At night, trains are parked on shunting yards. Here cleaning and small 
maintenance takes place, after which the trains have to leave in the 
morning at the planned departure time and in the desired composition, 
which may require splitting and coupling during their stay at the yard. 
As NS (Dutch Railways) continues to expand its fleet while the available 
yard space remains fixed, the shunting yards are becoming increasingly 
congested, with occupation rates reaching up to 90%. Consequently, 
planning all train movements and related activities has become a complex 
challenge. In this talk, I will discuss the main challenges encountered 
in planning the shunting yards and the algorithms that we have designed 
to tackle these problems. First, I want to discuss the shunting problem 
on a single yard. We solve this problem using local search; our 
algorithm is the first one that is capable of solving real-world problem 
instances of the complete shunting and scheduling problem. Next, I want 
to extend the problem to the entire station area, which requires that we 
distribute the trains over two (or more) shunting yards, while avoiding 
interference with through traffic and respecting the capacity of the 
separate shunting yards. The main difficulty here is that the capacity 
of the shunting yard is not known; we use data analysis to estimate it. 
Finally, I want to discuss the problem of assigning shunting tasks to 
train drivers. This is a variant of the technician routing problem 
without skills, but with synchronization. We have developed an algorithm 
for this that is based on a novel decomposition approach.

The next talk in our series will be:
Laurent Houssin (ENAC, Université de Toulouse) | December 10 | Flow-shop 
and job-shop robust scheduling problems with budgeted uncertainty
For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/

With kind regards

Zdenek Hanzalek, Michael Pinedo and Guohua Wan

-- 
Zdenek Hanzalek
Industrial Informatics Department,
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics,
Czech Technical University in Prague,
Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/

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