Dear scheduling researcher, We are delighted to announce the talk given by Carlo Mannino (SINTEF & Oslo Uni.). The title is "Train Scheduling: Models, decomposition methods and practice". The seminar will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, November 10 at 14:00 UTC. Join Zoom Meeting https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/95159122899?pwd=R3IrUUNuUi9IV09Cejczb0FDS0loQT09 <https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/95159122899?pwd=R3IrUUNuUi9IV09Cejczb0FDS0loQT09> Meeting ID: 951 5912 2899 Passcode: 786508 You can follow the seminar online or offline on our Youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoCNnaAfw5NAntItILFn4A The abstract follows. Train scheduling is one of the most critical planning tasks required to run a railway, with most rail operators and managers having large departments devoted to this task. Depending on the time scale, we have two main scheduling problems. At the strategic and tactical levels, the train timetabling problem consists in finding feasible, robust schedules that are usable for months or years into the future. At the operational level, we have the train re-scheduling problem, where one wants to schedule trains in real-time in order to tackle deviations from the original timetable, minimizing delays and knock-on effects. Both problems share a common core-model, which is a job-shop scheduling model with no-wait and blocking constraints. The core problem can be modeled as a disjunctive program. After an illustration of the train scheduling application, I will present a basic MILP formulation for the disjunctive program. It turns out, however, that even small to medium size real-life instances cannot be solved by simply instantiating this formulation and invoking a state-of-the-art MILP solver. Next, therefore, I will go through two recent reformulations, which allow us to significantly increase the size of tractable instances. The first is obtained from the classical Benders' reformulation by strengthening its standard constraints. The second is often referred to as "Logic Benders' Reformulation" and exploits a natural, spatial decomposition of the railway network. I will finally show the strong link between these reformulations. I will conclude the talk by presenting a practical application of the described approaches to a traffic management system controlling trains in the greater Oslo region network. The system is currently undergoing a field-test campaign at Oslo control center. The next talk in our series will be given by Michel Gendreau (Polytech Montréal) | November 24 | Tabu search for the time-dependent vehicle routing problem with time windows on a road network. For more details, please visit https://schedulingseminar.com/ With kind regards Zdenek, Mike and Guohua -- Zdenek Hanzalek Industrial Informatics Department, Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Jugoslavskych partyzanu 1580/3, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic https://rtime.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hanzalek/