Task oriented support for train shunting planning

Abstract. Train shunting planning for the Netherlands Railways is a complex planning problem that is performed by about 130 full-time planners. It concerns the planning of day-to-day shunting operations at the large stations in the railway network. In our study, the central question is: how can the planners be supported in their task with an advanced planning system? In contrast with the traditional way to design a scheduling support system, we based our system on an extensive task analysis. We describe the results of the task analysis, the design paradigm of task-oriented scheduling algorithms, and the resulting prototype. 1