Simultaneous Optimisation of Operating Costs and Passenger Service in Public Transit

In the Greater Copenhagen area approximately 200.000 hours are lost every day when passengers are waiting for a connecting bus or train. Hence, an enormous socio-economic potential lies within the development of new methods that can be used to generate timetables which have better temporal correspondences. Naturally, this can be achieved by assigning more resources to cover the timetables. However, the public transit companies are faced with administrative claims for cutting operating costs which renders improvements of the service intractable. Hence, efficient and near-optimal use of the resources is of paramount importance for the public transit companies.


The project addresses the multiple objective planning problem of generating timetables that on the one side is economically feasible for the transport companies and on the other hand also offers high-quality service to the passengers by minimising the unproductive time spent on waiting between one or more shifts.