Improving the modulo simplex algorithm for large-scale periodic timetabling

The periodic event scheduling problem (PESP), in which events have to be scheduled repeatedly over a given period, is a complex and well-known discrete problem with numerous real-world applications. The most prominent of them is to find periodic timetables in public transport. Although even finding a feasible solution to the PESP is NP-hard, recent achievements demonstrate the applicability and practicability of the periodic event scheduling model. In this paper we propose different approaches to improve the modulo network simplex algorithm (Nachtigall and Opitz, 2008 [17]), which is a powerful heuristic for the PESP problem, by exploiting improved search methods in the modulo simplex tableau and larger classes of cuts to escape from the many local optima. Numerical experiments on large-scale railway instances show that our algorithms not only perform better than the original method, but even outperform a state-of-the-art commercial MIP solver. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.