A Tool for Practical Integrated Time-Table Design and Vehicle Scheduling in Public Transport Systems

Planning of services and resources for public transport systems is a complex process. In practice the planning is usually decomposed into several stages, where service levels are decided first, while vehicles and drivers are only optimized later on. We describe the new TTD.XT tool, developed by M.A.I.O.R. S.r.l. in collaboration with the University of Pisa, that improves the efficient utilization of expensive resources by simultaneously optimizing timetabling and vehicle scheduling. We quickly present the underlying mathematical model and (math-heuristic) algorithm, and compare the solutions constructed by the tool for real-world bus transport planning instances for three major Italian cities with those produced by the standard sequential decision process; the former are significantly better than the latter both in terms of objective function value and when judged by experts of the field.