A novel two-stage approach to robust periodic timetabling

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. Finally, the computational times are promising for practical uses.