Optimization problems in airline and railway planning - a comparative survey

Both areas, airline planning and railway planning, have attracted a significant interest from the operations research and optimization community during the past decades. Although both areas have significant similarities, i.e. transport of people and goods according to specified schedules, the dissimilarities seem to prevail due to the mostly separate developments of these fields. In this paper we focus on the main planning fields in railway and airline transport, discuss similarities and differences in these areas and the corresponding modeling and optimization approaches. In some cases, we see that similarities depend on the specific application instance, e.g. the size of a railway network or other aspects of the organizational framework. In other cases there are no good reasons to treat the respective planning problems separately.