Suburban timetabling tool

The suburban timetabling tool helps in constructing timetables for a rail-network that offers services with high frequency and where rolling stock planning and terminal resources have to be considered in detail together with deciding the timings of services. An introduction to this tool is available in the presentation made to the Central Railways: pdf-file.

This tool can be used for:
  • to construct a timetable on a given network with known traversal times, headway constraints, terminal constraints and desired frequencies about services to different parts of the network,
  • to achieve service goals meeting constraints using a minimum number of rolling stock units (rakes, in Indian Railway suburban operations).
One can achieve the above with different levels of detail:
  • Only sequence of events (sequence of departures to different destinations from a major terminal), with or without exact timings.
  • Detailed timings at all major points of the network.
  • Platform occupancy check at terminals.
  • Detailed platform allocation satisfying local entry/exit movement constraints at terminals.
  • Rake-linkages at terminals and rake-cycles performed by different rolling stock units.

Currently this tool has been used to generate a draft timetable for the Mumbai Harbour Line timetable of Central Railways.

A version of the code that uses AMPL/Gurobi solver is available here.

A more recent version of the code that together with more elaborate code-documentation is available here.

Contributors: Anurag Agrawal, Soumya Dutta and Shashank Dangayach

Programming tools used:
AMPL/Python for modelling constraints and creating the MILP, Gurobi/CPLEX for solving MILPs, Python for pre- and post-processing the input/output to make it to a usable format.

Contact persons:

Prof. Narayan Rangaraj,
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR)
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076
Email: narayan.rangaraj[AT]iitb.ac.in

and/or:

Prof. Madhu N. Belur,
Department of Electrical Engineering,
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076
belur[AT]iitb.ac.in

Last modified: 18th April 2018