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Decision Support Tools for Customer-Oriented Dispatching

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4359))

Abstract

Unavoidable disturbances induce the necessity of operations control and dispatching tasks in the timetable-driven rail traffic. Therefore, dispatching becomes one of the most relevant challenges for the economic success, since it directly affects the timeliness of passengers, which is a core indicator of customer satisfaction. Thus, the integration of passenger preferences into dispatching strategies is a reasonable extension of conventional dispatching algorithms. In this paper we discuss decision support tools to be used by dispatchers in order to achieve customer orientation. The tools are based on an agent-based simulation system modelling the complete German railway network with about 30000 trains and millions of passengers per day. We report tests of various dispatching strategies considering passenger information and aiming to reduce passenger waiting times. We show that even simple heuristics produce better results than the rule based dispatching strategies currently in use.

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Frank Geraets Leo Kroon Anita Schoebel Dorothea Wagner Christos D. Zaroliagis

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© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Biederbick, C., Suhl, L. (2007). Decision Support Tools for Customer-Oriented Dispatching. In: Geraets, F., Kroon, L., Schoebel, A., Wagner, D., Zaroliagis, C.D. (eds) Algorithmic Methods for Railway Optimization. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4359. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74247-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74247-0_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74245-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74247-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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