A novel approach for automated timetable planning

In dense railway networks, infrastructure capacity is a great limitation and the planning tasks become more complex and time consuming. We propose a new two-stage model for solving a robust periodic timetabling problem that aims at finding a timetable that uses minimally the existing capacity and maximizes the robustness. The experimental results report high quality timetables and give an insight in appropriate objective functions. The proposed two-stage model is integrated in the micro-macro framework to construct operationally feasible timetables. Finally, the computational times are promising for practical uses.