Motional winner of best paper award!

Yahan Lu, Rob Goverde, Gábor Maróti and Dennis Huisman received the Best Paper Award at the 11th International Conference on Railway Operations Modelling and Analysis (RailDresden 2025) for their paper entitled “An iterative heuristic for strategic timetabling with integrated passenger routing in railway networks”.  This paper was developed under Work Package 6 of Europe’s Rail Flagship Project 1 “Motional” and was presented at RailDresden by Yahan Lu from TU Delft (fourth person from the right in the picture)

This paper presents an iterative heuristic to construct strategic timetables. Strategic timetables are used as an input for rail investments (infrastructure and rolling stock) business cases and are developed 5 – 20 years ahead, hence not all details of the disruptions due to rail infrastructure are considered. The quality of  strategic timetables can be evaluated using various KPIs, depending on the aspects considered . The authors of this paper selected a KPI based on the total generalized travel time summed over all passengers, where the generalized travel time of a passenger consists of the total travel time from its origin to its destination station. It includes in-train time, the waiting time at the station and transfer times between two trains (if needed), and included a transfer penalty.  The method developed in this paper proposes to use this KPI to determine the best timetable, which is a very difficult exercise from the computational perspective. However, the paper describes a heuristic method (i.e. an algorithm that is able to compute a reasonable solution in reasonable computation time) developed by the project to compute a good timetable. This solution has been tested on real-life instances of Netherlands Railways (NS) and provided good results.

For more information about the conference and the selected best papers, see https://www.iaror.org/2025/04/10/best-papers-of-raildresden-announced/