Norio TOMII, Li Jian ZHOU, Naoto FUKUMURA
An algorithm to make shunting schedules at stations automatically is introduced. At present, shunting are scheduled totally by hand, which naturally takes a lot of labor and time, because so many kinds of conditions have to be considered. Although the shunting scheduling problem can be regarded as a sort of resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), we need to develop new algorithms because it has several unique features which normal RCPSP do not have. We have devised a PERT network model to express a shunting schedule at a station, and then developed an algorithm combining probabilistic local search and PERT. We have confirmed its effectiveness by experiments using practical train schedule data.