Delay Management with Integrated Decisions on the Vehicle Circulations

The task of delay management in public transport is to decide whether a vehicle should wait for a delayed vehicle in order to maintain the connection for transferring passengers. So far, the vehicle circulations are often ignored in the optimization process, although they have an influence on the propagation of the delay through the network. In this paper we consider different ways from literature to incorporate vehicle circulations in the delay management stage of public transport planning. Since the IP formulation for the integrated problem is hard to solve, we investigate bounds and develop several heuristics for the integrated problem. Our experiments on close-to real-world instances show that integrating delay management and decisions on vehicle circulations may reduce the overall delay by up to 39 percent. We also compare the runtimes and objective function values of the different heuristics. We conclude that we can find competitive solutions in a reasonable amount of time