Demand responsive scheduling of rail container traffic

Timetables are of utmost importance to a rail business because a rail carrier’s profitability is heavily influenced by its service offerings. A need for demand responsive schedules is obvious not only because there is a risk that some potential customers may turn away if the customer’s preferred itinerary is not attainable, but also because the take-up of some services in a fixed schedule may be low and therefore not profitable. We focus our attention on the step of constructing schedules that match, or respond to, customer demand, whilst maintaining the minimum operating costs for the rail carrier. We formulate the rail scheduling problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and propose a constraint-based search algorithm to solve the problem. The model is tested on data from the Royal State Railway of Thailand with 184 customers. The results show that the schedules generated have the potential to reduce the rail carrier’s operating costs, enhances the customer satisfaction through a demand responsive schedule.