Urban and inter-cities transportation network timetable optimization – HORUS

HORUS project
Consortium composed of the PRiSM laboratory (CaRO team), EURODECISION and the CReSTIC laboratory (SysCom team).

Building optimized transportation services (urban, peri-urban and interurban) is a major issue for public and private operators. The great complexity of this task usually justifies its decomposition into sequential steps : timetabling of the bus, tramways or trains (vehicle scheduling), assignment of personnel services to the vehicles (crew scheduling) and building individual shifts. To achieve this task, only the major companies have access to decision support systems including optimization modules. In the last decade, EURODECISION integrated its crew scheduling software component, LP-EasyDriver, to the activities of RATP and, more recently, VEOLIA. The optimization methods of this tool, as well as similar ones from competitors, are based on column generation techniques and hybrid approaches.
By expanding their functional scope, these methods may also be applied to the railway sector.

The main goal of the HORUS project is to prepare the next generation transportation services by overcoming many challenges :
- extension to the railway sector (higher combinatorial and business complexities),
- design of global optimization of the vehicle and crew scheduling problems,
- access to multi-core computing through algorithms parallelization,
- access to the optimization algorithms through free software and shared Web services.

From an academic point of view, PRiSM and CReSTIC, two university laboratories well known for their expertise in combinatorial optimization (advanced column generation and metaheuristic methods) and parallel computing, are proposing significant contributions in the sequential and parallel resolution methods dedicated to these problems : arcs-states modeling, column generation, innovative metaheuristics (Trust Branching Path) and hybridization techniques including metaheuristics and exact approaches.
From an industrial point of view, EURODECISION is a technical center of expertise on previously mentioned methods and transport business services. EURODECISION is then able to capitalize on the proposed innovations by diffusing them directly to the transport operators or through business software editors.