Many of us use public transport on a regular basis to come to campus, afternoon/evening/weekend activities, or for going on vacation.

However, the regular use of public transport often comes with some frustrations: why is there no direct connection from my origin to my destination? Why do I have to wait so long during a transfer? Why is the bus late again? ...

Optimization models designed for strategic, tactical and operational planning in passenger transport aim to design routes and schedules that are 'optimal' in some sense - trading-off the interests of different passenger groups and of the operator. A second trade-off to be kept in mind in optimization is between model accuracy and model complexity - models that include (too) many details are often not solvable for reasonable instance size and therefore useless in practice.

In this seminar we will discuss integer linear programming models for optimization problems in passenger transportation. Each presentation will be based on a paper (a list of candidate papers will be made available at the start of the semester, but you can also propose papers not on the list). Based on the models from the papers, we will discuss ILP modeling techniques and underlying modeling assumptions.

For the final report, the students are supposed to summarize the presented paper, to propose a modification/improvement of the presented model, and to compare original and modified model on suitable test instances using CPLEX.

The seminar forms a good basis for a thesis in the area of passenger transport.

You can already inscribe on WueCampus using password OptPT. Course information will follow soon.

More/also interested in optimization methods? The lecture 'Operations Research' (with focus on methods for linear and integer linear programming) is offered this semester as well and is a good complement to this seminar.