An Overview of Passenger Railway Rolling Stock Scheduling

Due to expensive and limited resources of railway systems, efficient use of these resources has been highlighted. In this regard due to operational constraints of daily changes of train composition, determining the appropriate train composition to satisfy passenger demand is sought. This paper presents an overview of passenger railway rolling stock scheduling. The literature can be divide into two main cases: the first one considers assignment of locomotives and cars and the second one considers train units. In the first case for each trip the objective is to find appropriate locomotive types and their number and car types and their number. Due to different locomotives pulling power, the number of cars and locomotives are dependent on each other. In the second case, as the cars are self-propelled we just need to determine the number of train-units. These topics are addressed in this paper. Modeling techniques along with solution methods of each case will be discussed.