Vehicle scheduling based on a line plan

We consider the following problem: given a set of lines in a public transportation network with their round trip times and frequencies, a maximum number of vehicles and a maximum number of lines that can be combined into a vehicle circulation, does there exist a set of vehicle circulations that covers all lines given the constraints. Solving this problem provides an estimate of the costs of operating a certain line plan, without having to compute a timetable first. We show that this problem is NP-hard for any restriction on the number of lines that can be combined into a circulation which is equal to or greater than three. We pay special attention to the case where at most two lines can be combined into a circulation, which is NP-hard if a single line can be covered by multiple circulations. If this is not allowed, a matching algorithm can be used to find the optimal solutions, which we show to be a 16/15-approximation for the case where it is allowed. We also provide an exact algorithm that is able to exploit low tree-width of the so-called circulation graph and small numbers of vehicles required to cover single circulations