A Simple Way to Compute the Number of Vehicles That Are Required to Operate a Periodic Timetable

摘要

We consider the following planning problem in public transportation: Given a periodic timetable, how many vehicles are required to operate it? In [Julius Paetzold et al., 2017], for this sequential approach, it is proposed to first expand the periodic timetable over time, and then answer the above question by solving a flow-based aperiodic optimization problem. In this contribution we propose to keep the compact periodic representation of the timetable and simply solve a particular perfect matching problem. For practical networks, it is very much likely that the matching problem decomposes into several connected components. Our key observation is that there is no need to change any turnaround decision for the vehicles of a line during the day, as long as the timetable stays exactly the same.