The recent market survey and operation practice in China railways show that passengers with different journey time have different favorite departure and arrival time windows. But no scientific way has been adopted to consider this feature in train scheduling practice. The determination of passenger train departure and arrival times presently still depends on the experience of train schedulers. In this paper, the problem is analyzed. Models and algorithms to optimize passenger train departure and arrival time windows in scheduling are proposed. The main objectives to be optimized include minimizing the total passenger inconvenience and the number of passenger cars needed to operate trains. Both subproblems are formulated as assignment problem to solve. The algorithms have been programmed and tested with the data from China railways.
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