älardalen niversity Press Licentiate Theses

After the deregulation of the Swedish railway industry, train operating compa-nies compete for and on the same infrastructure. This makes the allocation of rail capacity a most delicate problem, and for a well-functioning railway system the allocation must be fair, efficient and functional. The capacity allocation tasks include e.g. constructing the yearly timetable and making track allocation plans for rail yards. The state of practice is that experienced planners construct the schedules manually with little or no decision support. However, as the planners are often faced with large combinatorial problems that are notoriously hard to solve there is a great potential in imple-menting optimising decision support systems. The research presented in this licentiate thesis aims at developing and examining mathematical models and methods that could be part of such support systems. The thesis focuses on two planning problems in particular, and the presented methods have been developed especially for the Swedish railway system