Metro Scheduling for Special Events

In this paper we introduce the metro scheduling problem for a large event, e.g., a football match or a concert. We consider a metro line serving the venue of such an event. The ordinary metro timetable, which is typically based on constant headway between all stations, may lead to prolonged waiting when serving large events. To better handle such situations, we propose the Metro Scheduling for Events (MSE) problem to optimize the scheduling of a metro line serving a special event. In the MSE each train is scheduled individually, and trains are allowed to short-turn (i.e., the trains are allowed to reverse direction before reaching a terminal station). We develop a MILP formulation for the problem and an efficient iterated local search heuristic. We consider four objective functions representing different service measures. These are compared through computational experiments, which also demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic.