View article

Railway scheduling and timetabling are common stages in the classical hierarchical railway planning process and they perhaps represent the step with major influence on user's perception about quality of service. This aspect, in conjunction with their contribution to service profitability, makes them a widely studied topic in the literature, where, nowadays, many efforts are focused on improving the solving methods of the corresponding optimization problems. However, literature about models considering detailed descriptions of passenger demand is sparse. This paper tackles the problem of timetable determination by means of building and solving a nonlinear integer programming model that fits the arrival and departure train times to a dynamic behavior of demand. The optimization model results are then used for computing several measures to characterize the quality of the obtained timetables considering jointly …