A greedy approach for a rolling stock management problem using multi-interval constraint propagation

Abstract

International audienceIn this article we present our contribution to the Rolling Stock Unit Management problem proposed for the ROADEF/EURO Challenge 2014. We propose a greedy algorithm to assign trains to departures. Our approach relies on a routing procedure using multi-interval constraint propagation to compute the individual schedules of trains within the railway station. This algorithm allows to build an initial solution, satisfying a significant subset of departures

Trains do not vanish: the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2014

“…Let us remark that this team finished at first place during the first phase (qualification) but was ranked third in the final phase. The source code is published [6] Joudrier and Thiard (team J9, ranked first in junior category, see [9] in this special issue) use a simple constructive heuristic without post optimization. As the previous team, they start by grouping equivalent resources to simplify the graph model and compute shortest paths between pairs of resource by train category.…”