In railways, transportation service based on fixed train schedules has been traditionally provided. This approach has a couple of merits both for railway companies and users such as time and labors to make and transmit transportation schedules can be minimized and it is easy to memorize the train schedules. This approach, however, has defects as well. Some of them are; it is not possible to effectively use the resources such as crews and rolling stock, and it is quite difficult to fulfill customers' satisfaction, since schedules in which customers' demands and considered are not always provided. In this paper, we examine the issues to realize an efficient and effective railway transportation reflecting customers' demands by utilizing IT.

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