Optimizing Vehicle Scheduling Based on Variable Timetable by Benders-and-Price Approach

In practice, vehicle scheduling is planned on a variable timetable so that the departure times of trips can be shifted in tolerable ranges, rather than on a fixed timetable, to decrease the required fleet size. This paper investigates the vehicle scheduling problem on a variable timetable with the c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zekang Lan, Shiwei He, Rui Song, Sijia Hao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2019-01-01
Series:Journal of Advanced Transportation
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2019/2781590
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Summary:In practice, vehicle scheduling is planned on a variable timetable so that the departure times of trips can be shifted in tolerable ranges, rather than on a fixed timetable, to decrease the required fleet size. This paper investigates the vehicle scheduling problem on a variable timetable with the constraint that each vehicle can perform limited trips. Since the connection-based model is difficult to solve by optimization software for a medium-scale or large-scale instance, a designed path-based model is developed. A Benders-and-Price algorithm by combining the Benders decomposition and column generation is proposed to solve the LP-relaxation of the path-based model, and a bespoke Branch-and-Price is used to obtain the integer solution. Numerical experiments indicate that a variable timetable approach can reduce the required fleet size with a tolerable timetable deviation in comparison with a fixed timetable approach. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is greatly superior to GUROBI in terms of computational efficiency and guarantees the quality of the solution.
ISSN:0197-6729
2042-3195