On April 14, 2008, in Baltimore, Maryland, Netherlands Railways was awarded the 2008 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The railway changed their entire timetable, originally created in 1970, to better meet the demands of the current Dutch society.  From another article on the INFORMS site, we learned about the solution that was created, as well as the value of the solution.

Operations researchers at CWI and Erasmus University Rotterdam constructed an improved, cyclical timetable allowing the schedule to be repeated every hour. Constructing such a timetable is a complex combinatorial optimization problem. One O.R. problem solver, called CADANS, solves the network timetabling problem, and a second, STATIONS, finds the detailed routes for the trains through the different stations. A third, ROSA, handles rolling stock circulation, using ILOG CPLEX and ILOG OPL Development Studio. Yet another, TURNI, schedules crews.

2007 showed an all-time record in number of passengers. Lines with the largest timetable improvements saw an increase in passenger demand of 10-15%. The percentage of trains arriving within 3 minutes of the scheduled time increased from 84.8 % in 2006 to 87.0 % in 2007, which is again an all-time high record. Surveys showed public opinion changed radically from negative to positive. The more efficient resource schedules and the increased number of passengers already resulted in an annual additional profit of 40 million Euros ($60 million). It is expected that this will increase to 70 million Euros ($105 million) in coming years. Finally, a further increase in railway transport on the current network is possible, which would reduce road congestion and pollution from greenhouse gases.

More information can be found in this success story on the ILOG web site.  We congratulate Netherlands Railways and their Operations Research collaborators (University of Padua, Erasmus University, CWI, and Safiro Software Solutions BV) on their great accomplishment.