Efficient algorithms for the multi-period line planning problem in public transportation

In order to plan and schedule a demand-responsive public transportation system, both temporal and spatial changes in demand should be taken into account even at the line planning stage. We study the multi-period line planning problem with integrated decisions regarding dynamic allocation of vehicles among the lines. Given the NP-hard nature of the line planning problem, the multi-period version is clearly difficult to solve for large public transit networks even with advanced solvers. It becomes necessary to develop algorithms that are capable of solving even the very-large instances in reasonable time. For instances which belong to real public transit networks, we present results of a heuristic local branching algorithm and an exact approach based on constraint propagation