Author : Trivedi Hemant S.

The suburban railway system In Mumbai caters to almost 7.5 million people every day, and this number is steadily increasing. In this paper, the problem of deciding on the levels of service, construction of terminal facilities provision of differentiated services( e g fast trains, slow trains, different classes of travel etc.,) and finally the important issue of drawing up the schedule as a combination of various services has been examined. The perspective given here is one of demand satisfaction at the maximum level subject to the supply constraints, rather than one of supply efficiency maximization at certain acceptable levels of service, With the slowly growing supply of services completely unable to keep up with the fast growing demand, public attention is now being increasingly focused on even the details of schedules Decision, to extend trains, provide reversals at terminals, provide fast services, etc are all now at the cost of some other service factor, as the system is heading towards saturated levels of operation. An integrated method of evaluating various service factors to judge the effectiveness of the schedule has been presented in this paper. The ana1yis considers waiting time at the station, travel times and convenience of travel because of trains starting at particular points, to construct a composite service objective which can be optimized. In effect, It can minimize certain measure of passenger inconvenience. In theoretical terms, the permissible schedules from an operational standpoint form a large feasible set and the complicated nature of the composite objective makes for a difficult optimization problem. Simple heuristics and other solution techniques for this type of problem are discussed in this paper. In fact, the advantage of the proposed method is that since it is an open policy based on well-defined demand criteria, it would lend to increased user participation in defining demands accurately, accepting the constraints of supply and dealing with tradeoffs. To the supply authority, (the railways), this method would help in increasing the operational efficiencies, and identifying operational bottlenecks. These effects would have a long-term impact on public acceptance, involvement and commitment to investing and operating public transport systems

Keywords: Rail, Commuter, Scheduling, Tactical, Modeling, Headway, Service, Operational Efficiency

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.6, No.1 (Feb-2016)