Railway scheduling problems and their decomposition

Railway scheduling problems are quite popular scheduling and optimization problems which are treated in a large variety of papers and projects. Many special and even quite general situations have been investigated theoretically and also a variety of applied approaches tested on real-world instances has been developed.This thesis mainly deals with the problem of scheduling trains in railway networks with respect to given routings, fixed minimal travelling times, and other constraints like time-windows. It combines the theory of some well-known scheduling models with its applications in railway scheduling. The railway scheduling problems considered in this work are closely related to job-shop scheduling problems with blocking and some additional constraints. Therefore part of this research is related to these shop scheduling problems. Theoretical scheduling models are extended, complexity results are derived and solution methods are proposed. Most results are applied to the considered railway scheduling problems. In addition to approaches which treat railway problems as a whole also decomposition methods for these problems and corresponding solution methods are presented. These solution methods are tested and compared with simple greedy procedures