Conference article

In passenger railway stations, train units preparation is crucial for service quality. This preparation includes maintenance check, cleaning, coupling and uncoupling. Such opera-tions require parking train units on shunting yards located close to platforms. Therefore trains have to be moved between platform and shunting tracks. Taking over train units be-tween their arrival and their departure in a station constitutes shunting. The Generalized Train Unit Shunting problem (G-TUSP) is the problem of shunting operations planning. The problem is to assign arriving train units to departing train units, shunting tracks and paths, to schedule shunting movements and to assign crews to maintenance operations. The aim of the paper is to provide an optimization approach for the G-TUSP. The contribution presents an integrated problem with a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formula-tion. The formulation is based on a microscopic model of the infrastructure and formal train units in order to consider coupling and uncoupling. The model is solved exactly using the commercial solver CPLEX. It is tested on instances based on Metz-Ville station in France. The results are promising and show the suitability of the model.

Train Unit Shunting, Train Maintenance Scheduling, Track Allocation, Routing, Railway Station Capacity