Allocation of Trains to Platforms at Railway Station

This paper deals with the organization of train traffic in a passenger railway stations. One of the important problems which a dispatcher has to solve every day is track allocation for every approaching train. There is a tool helping him in his job called the Track Occupancy Plan, which is attached to the train traffic diagram. The plans specify the scheduled times (of arrivals and departures), as well as the assignment of platform tracks to arriving or departing trains. In this paper the problem of allocation of trains to platforms is formulated as a bi-criterion mixed integer programming problem. The first objective is to minimise the deviations of the arrival and departure times proposed by the model from the times specified by the timetable. The second criterion maximises the desirability of the platform tracks to be assigned to the trains. For finding a solution there is used a lexicographic approach and the local branching algorithm.