Computer-aided transit scheduling. Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on computer-aided scheduling of public transport, held in Hamburg, FRG, 28th -- 31st July 1987 (Q1801280)

[The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually.] This book is the Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Computer-aided Scheduling of Public Transport, which was held in Hamburg from 28th to 31st July 1987. It consists of 28 selected papers and is categorized into five groups. The first group contains only a single background paper outlinining the history of computer-aided scheduling and surveying current systems. The second, including 10 papers, is mainly devoted to theoretical bases for scheduling systems. The third, also including 10 papers, contributed to the description of systems themselves. The fourth consists of three papers from users of the most widely used systems, i.e., Sage, Busman and Hastus. The final group contains papers on on-line network planning systems having a particular affinity with scheduling. The problems such as bus and crew scheduling discussed in this book occured in urban mass transit companies attempting to reduce the conflict between demands for expansion of available services and decreasing subsidies. This means that the solution methods must be practicable. On the other hand, from the view point of mathematical programming, these are integer programming problems including set covering, set partitioning assignment and network flow problems, all of which are intractable. Thus, the only practical way of escaping from this situation is to establish computer-aided planning systems utilizing heuristics armed with mathematical programming tools. In fact, a variety of tools, including the standard minimum cost flow algorithm, dynamic programming, the shortest path algorithm and Lagrangian relaxation are reported in this book. From these points of view, this book is very informative.