European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627

www.elsevier.com/locate/ejor

A time–space network based exact optimization model

for multi-depot bus scheduling
Natalia Kliewer *, Taı̈eb Mellouli, Leena Suhl
Decision Support & Operations Research Lab, University of Paderborn, Warburger Street 100, 33098 Paderborn, Germany

Available online 6 April 2005

Abstract

The vehicle scheduling problem, arising in public transport bus companies, addresses the task of assigning buses to
cover a given set of timetabled trips with consideration of practical requirements, such as multiple depots and vehicle
types as well as depot capacities. An optimal schedule is characterized by minimal fleet size and minimal operational
costs including costs for unloaded trips and waiting time. This paper discusses the multi-depot, multi-vehicle-type
bus scheduling problem (MDVSP), involving multiple depots for vehicles and different vehicle types for timetabled
trips. We use time–space-based instead of connection-based networks for MDVSP modeling. This leads to a crucial size
reduction of the corresponding mathematical models compared to well-known connection-based network flow or set
partitioning models. The proposed modeling approach enables us to solve real-world problem instances with thousands
of scheduled trips by direct application of standard optimization software. To our knowledge, the largest problems that
we solved to optimality could not be solved by any existing exact approach. The presented research results have been
developed in co-operation with the provider of transportation planning software PTV AG. A software component to
support planners in public transport was designed and implemented in context of this co-operation as well.
 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Transportation; Vehicle scheduling; Multi-depot bus scheduling; Time–space network; Decision support systems

1. Introduction transport companies focus on efficient use of re-

sources, especially vehicles and drivers. Operations
1.1. Motivation research based decision support systems play here-
by a crucial role.
Been obliged to act market-oriented instead Service trips are provided as products with
of the traditional monopolistic approach, public fixed departure and arrival times as well as
start and end locations. The transport resour-
*
Corresponding author. ces, operating these trips have to be allocated guar-
E-mail address: kliewer@upb.de (N. Kliewer). anteeing their availability at the right time on

0377-2217/$ - see front matter  2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2005.02.030
 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
the right place, by minimizing total costs of
resources.
We consider the scheduling of vehicles under
constraints and objectives arising in urban and
suburban public transport. Thus, each timetabled
trip can be served by a vehicle belonging to a given
set of vehicle types. Each vehicle has to start and
end its work day in one of the given depots (here:
parking garage).
After serving one timetabled (loaded) trip, each
bus can serve one of the trips starting later from
the station where the vehicle is standing, or it
can change its location by moving unloaded to
an another station (deadhead trip) in order to
serve the next loaded trip starting there.
The cost components include fixed costs for
required vehicles as well as variable operational
costs. The variable costs consist of distance-depen-
dent travel costs and time-dependent costs for time
spent outside the depot—the case where a driver is
obliged to stay with the bus. All cost components
depend on vehicle type. Since the fixed vehicle cost
components are usually orders of magnitude high-
er than the operational costs, the optimal solution
always involves the minimal number of vehicles.
The combinatorial complexity of the multi-
depot bus scheduling problem (MDVSP1 in the
following) is determined by numerous possibilities
to assign vehicle type to each trip, to build se-
quences of trips for particular buses, and to assign
buses to certain depots. To represent these se-
quences of trips, exact modeling approaches
known in the literature consider explicitly all pos-
sible connections—pairs of trips that can be served
successively.
In context of this paper, we refer to all models
that represent connections explicitly as ‘‘connec-
tion-based’’ models. Because connection-based
MDVSP models inherently include a large number
of arcs, such models of practical dimension with
thousands of trips and multiple depots can often
not be solved with standard optimization software
packages. Known publications describe in detail
applications of techniques such as column genera-
1
MDVSP means in the sense of this paper the MDMVTBSP—
the multi-depot, multi-vehicle-type bus scheduling problem.
1617
tion and Lagrangean relaxation for the multi-com-
modity flow formulation (see Löbel (1999)), or an
auction algorithm for the quasi-assignment formu-
lation (see Freling (1997)) of the MDVSP.
In cases where suboptimal solutions are suffi-
cient, other authors propose heuristic methods,
such as schedule first—cluster second approaches
(Daduna and Paixão (1995)), or shortest path-
based heuristics (DellÕAmico et al. (1993)).
Another approximate approach to cope with
real-world instances is the artificial limitation of
degrees of freedom for vehicle type and depot
assigning. Furthermore, one may consider only a
subset of possible deadhead trips (see, e.g., Löbel
(1999)).
From our point of view, the explicit modeling
of all possible connections seems to be inefficient
for large scale planning problems, because the
number of such pairs grows quadratically with
the number of scheduled trips.
1.2. Intention
The objective of this paper is to introduce a new
modeling approach by applying a time–space net-
work technique which avoids the explosive in-
crease of the model size with a growing
timetable. The new model should enable us to
solve multi-depot vehicle scheduling problems of
practical sizes and complexity, arizing in large
public transport companies. Thus, we might be
able to use standard optimization software (such
as ILOG CPLEX or MOPS (see ILOG (2003)
and Suhl (2003))), and profit from the recent sig-
nificant improvements in optimization software.
If we would use the specific algorithms developed
for connection based models, it would not be pos-
sible to take advantage of the improvements in
standard software.
1.3. Results
We implemented the time–space network based
modeling approach as a software component
which has been integrated in commercial software
packages to support planning processes in public
transport. This software component generates
mathematical models for given instances and
1618 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
solves them to optimality. We have carried out
tests on real-life timetables of several public trans-
port companies in Germany, such as Munich. In-
stances with more than 11,000 trips were
provided by PTV AG. Concerning groups of vehi-
cle types allowed for certain trips, this problem
decomposes into four disjunct multi-depot prob-
lems. The largest of them has more than 7000
scheduled trips.
1.4. Outline
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 con-
tains a definition of MDVSP. Section 3 describes
MDVSP models known in literature, having sub-
stantial similarity in the representation of possible
connections. In Section 4, a time–space network
MDVSP model is introduced, and its advantages
compared to existing models are discussed. Section
5 shows computational results on test instances and
MIP-solver performance depending on problem
complexity. Section 6 gives conclusions.
2. The multi-depot multi-vehicle type scheduling
problem
We define the vehicle scheduling problem
(VSP), arising in public bus transportation, as
the task of building an optimal set of rotations
(vehicle schedule), such that each trip of a given
timetable is covered by exactly one rotation. For
each trip the timetable specifies a departure time
and an arrival time with start and end stations
respectively.
Within a bus tour consisting of several (loaded)
service trips chained with each other, the use of
deadhead trips (unloaded trips between two end
stations) often provides an improvement in order
to serve all trips of a given timetable by a mini-
mum number of buses. Thus a work day for a
given bus is defined as a sequence of trips, dead-
heads, waiting times at stations (parking stops)
and pull-out/pull-in trips from/to the assigned de-
pot. Since deadhead trips mean an additional cost
factor, minimization of this cost and minimization
of waiting time cost are important optimization
goals.
There are several variations of the bus schedul-
ing problem involving different side constraints or
numbers of depots and/or of bus types. The
restrictions and optimization criteria may differ
from one problem setting to another.
The multi-depot vehicle scheduling problem in-
volves several depots, so that a vehicle has to re-
turn in the evening to the same depot from
which it started in the morning.
Multi-vehicle-type VSP considers heteroge-
neous fleet of vehicles—for example normal bus,
minibus, and kneel bus. For a given trip we define
a group of vehicle types this trip can be served by.
For example, a trip to a bus stop near a hospital
can be served only by handicapped accessible vehi-
cles such as kneel bus or normal bus with a ramp
extension. In a feasible solution each rotation is as-
signed to exactly one depot and at least to one
vehicle type.
Furthermore, it is possible to state capacity
restrictions for depots, which means that a depot
has only a restricted number of (overnight) park-
ing slots for buses. Other kinds of capacity con-
strains set a limit for the number of available
vehicles of certain bus types and for the number
of certain type vehicles in a given depot.
It is well known that the single-depot homoge-
neous fleet vehicle scheduling problem is a polyno-
mially solvable minimum cost flow problem, while
the multiple depot and the heterogeneous fleet ver-
sions and their combinations imply that the opti-
mization problem becomes NP-hard (see Bertossi
et al. (1987)).
The complexity of instances of the MDVSP de-
pends on various factors, such as:
• the number of timetabled trips,
• the number of depots, or more precisely, the
average number of depot-vehicle type combina-
tions per timetabled trip,
• the number of possible unloaded trips, which
can vary depending on the completeness of the
distance matrix for stop points.
Fig. 1 shows a simple example for a timetable
with three trips and a station topology with dis-
tances expressed in time units. Stations k3 and k4
are depots. Trips a and c can be served by buses
 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
Timetable
Trip From To Dep. Arr. d1 D2
time time
a k1 k2 1 2 + +
b k2 k1 3 4 - +
c k2 k1 5 6 + +
Fig. 1. An example for a timetable with three trips and distance matrix for 2 stop points and 2 depots.
from depots d1 and d2, whereas trip b can only be
served from depot d2.
In the following, we discuss state-of-the-art
solution techniques for the MDVSP as well as
present a new model for solving them with stan-
dard optimization software. Differences between
connection-based and time–space-network-based
models will be illustrated on the example from
Fig. 1.
3. Existing connection-based MDVSP models
Traditionally, mathematical optimization mod-
els for public mass transit are based on a network
where trips and depots are represented by nodes
(trip-nodes and depot-nodes, respectively), and
possible connections between trips given by arcs
(see, e.g., Daduna and Paixão (1995)). The rota-
tion of a vehicle is thus generated as a flow of
one unit starting in the depot and returning back
into it. The nodes connected by a flow represent
the scheduled trips, carried out by the correspond-
ing vehicle.
The single-depot case of the VSP can be mod-
eled as a minimum cost flow problem. Vehicles
represent the flow units circulating in this network.
Each arc is provided with the cost of its corre-
sponding activity—stand time cost, deadhead or
fixed vehicle cost. The objective is to minimize
the total flow costs over all arcs. All flow units in-
volved in the single-depot problem are of the same
type, so that the incoming and outgoing flow of
each trip-node has to be equal to one. The mathe-
matical model consists of the minimum cost flow
problem with flow conservation constraints for
each network node. No integrality constraints
are needed because of the unimodularity of the
1619
d1(k3) Stop points and depots
1 time unit
1
k1 k2
d2(k4)
coefficient matrix of the linear programming
relaxation.
For the multi-depot case, the network is multi-
plied, so that there is a network layer for each
depot. Mathematical formulation of the model
contains additional restrictions, called cover con-
straints, guaranteeing that each scheduled trip is
carried out by exactly one vehicle belonging to
one of the required vehicle types. Because of the
explicit integrality constraints (all flow variables
must be equal to 0 or 1), the optimization model
is no more a minimum cost flow model and is
now difficult to solve.
Fig. 2 illustrates an application of the traditional
modeling approach to the example from Fig. 1.
Each trip to be scheduled is represented by a depar-
ture node and an arrival node, together with an arc
joining them. Other arcs join arrival nodes with
later departure nodes, representing the possibility
of a single vehicle undertaking the two correspond-
ing trips in succession. Further arcs represent bus
movements to and from depot nodes. Each arc
has an associated cost factor (deadhead cost for
arcs joining arrival nodes to later departure nodes,
vehicle cost for pull-out and/or pull-in arcs), and
capacity (one for service trips, depot capacities
for circular arcs). The network involves two net-
work layers: one layer for each depot.
A flow solution is feasible only if the flow value
is equal to one on exactly one of all service trip
arcs representing a certain service trip in different
layers (see for example Fig. 2: unbroken arcs a in
d1 and d2 layers). The optimal flow (feasible flow
with minimum total costs) for this network now
determines the optimal vehicle schedule for the ori-
ginal timetable. A circulation flow down to the
right gives an example for feasible and fleet-mini-
mal solution.
1620 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
a Trip compatibility arcs
depot d1
c d1-Layer
depot d2 b
d2-Layer
Fig. 2. The example from Fig. 1 modeled with the connection-based approach.
We can clearly identify three different ap-
proaches among the existing modeling techniques:
• path-oriented—leading to set partitioning for-
mulation (see Ribeiro and Soumis (1994)),
• arc-oriented—leading to multi-commodity flow
formulation (compare e.g. Forbes et al. (1994)),
and
• combinations of these two approaches (see Car-
paneto et al. (1989)).
In all these modeling approaches, the possible
trip connections are considered explicitly and the
number of such connections, corresponding to
the number of integer variables, grows quadrati-
cally in dependence of the number of loaded trips.
Therefore, models with several thousand sched-
uled trips become too large to be solved directly
by standard optimization tools in a reasonable
time. Various techniques to reduce the number of
possible connections have been proposed in the lit-
erature. Some approaches discard arcs with too
long waiting times, others generate arcs applying
the column generation idea to the network flow
representation.
4. A new time–space network flow model for
MDVSP
Time–space network (TSN) models have been
proposed for routing problems in airline schedul-
Service trip arcs
Pull-in/pull-out arcs
Circulation flow arc
ing (see Hane et al. (1995) as an example), because
they are advantageous in modeling possible con-
nections between arriving and departing flights.
In a time–space network, connections within a
location are realized by using a time line that con-
nects all possible landing and takeoff events within
the location. Thus, there is no need to explicitly
model connections for each feasible pair of events
within a location.
Time–space network models were not used for
bus scheduling problems until now, because, com-
pared to airline scheduling where deadheading is
generally not allowed, bus scheduling permits
unrestricted deadheading. Thus the advantages
given by TSN remained negligible, because of
too many deadhead arcs.
However, we show in this section that a new
modeling technique leads to a drastic reduc-
tion of arcs, simultaneously allowing all possi-
ble deadheads, so that we may exploit the
advantages of TSN models for bus scheduling
problems.
4.1. Modeling of connections within the
time–space network
The new TSN model is based on aggregation of
possible connection arcs so that it is possible to
carry several connections on one single arc simul-
taneously. Basically, we have to take into account
three types of potential connections:
 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627 1621

• connections within one station,
• connections over a depot with pull in/pull out
trips to/from the depot, and
• connections through a directly connecting trip
(deadhead).
4.1.1. Connections within one station
A connection within one station means the
(standard) case where the successor trip starts at
the same station where the predecessor trip ends.
We build a time line for each station, as well as
for depots. A time line contains all arrivals and
departures at the given location at their corre-
sponding points of time. The network contains a
trip arc (Fig. 3: unbroken arcs) for each scheduled
trip—from the start event on the time line of the
start station to the end event on the time line of
the end station.
In contrast to connection-based models from
the literature, the connections within one station
must not be modeled explicitly by connection arcs,
but can be implicitly represented by the flow
through the timeline. The compatible trip pairs
(a, b) and (a, c) from Fig. 2 can now be connected
by waiting arcs (Fig. 3: dotted arcs) in the time line
of station k2.
4.1.2. Connections over a depot with pull
in/pull out trips to/from the depot
In analogy to stations we build a time line for
each depot, although there may not be scheduled
trips starting or ending directly in a depot. To each
scheduled trip i we introduce, if necessary, arcs for

Fig. 3. The example from Fig. 1 modeled with new time–space network approach.
1622 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
potential pull-out and pull-in trips from/to each
depot directly before/after carrying out i (with
associated deadhead costs) (Fig. 3: punctured
arcs). Because it is more favorable for buses to
stand at a depot than at other stations, we place
a higher cost for waiting arcs outside the depots,
therefore avoiding long waiting times outside the
depots.
4.1.3. Connections through a directly connecting
trip (deadhead)
Basically it is possible to connect each pair of
compatible trips through deadheading. However,
as the number of possible deadhead trips can be
extremely high, a direct modeling of all of them
in large networks implies a problem size which
cannot be handled by state-of-the-art solvers.
1. Stage with all possible matches
Station k
Station l
2. Stage with waiting arcs in station l
Station k
Station l
Station k
Station l
Fig. 4. Two-stage aggregation of possible connections.
Thus, a crucial modeling technique is aggrega-
tion of possible matches—directly connecting trips
between scheduled trips. Fig. 4 shows the equiva-
lence to the connection-based approach relating to
the feasible solutions set of VSP. The aggregation
of possible trip connections is carried out in three
steps, as explained below:
First stage aggregation
For each arriving scheduled trip i at station k
we determine the first trip compatible with i at
each other station l(k 5 l). We call this trip first-
match (i, l). We introduce only those deadheading
arcs into the model, which correspond to the first
matches. Thus, the number of arcs is reduced sig-
nificantly compared to the original situation. Nev-
ertheless, all possible connections remain feasible.
Each scheduled trip j compatible to a scheduled
Space
Time
Matches
First Matches
Latest First Matches
 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
trip i can now be reached in the model network
over first-match (i, start-station (j))—possibly via
waiting arcs at start-station (j).
Second stage aggregation
At the second stage, the number of arcs is fur-
ther reduced. We aggregate the set of first matches
in a smaller set of latest first matches (see Fig. 4).
The latest first matches can be determined in the
following way: Let S be the set of incoming trips
i at station k, having the same first match jS at sta-
tion l. Let iL be the latest incoming trip in S. Then
the latest first match for each element in S is the
first match (iL, k). By removing all arcs corre-
sponding to first matches but being no latest first
matches, we reduce the network significantly, but
do not loose any possible connections. Every
scheduled trip j compatible to scheduled trip i
can now be reached over the corresponding latest
first match to the start station of j, and possibly
via waiting arcs in one or both connection lines.
Third stage aggregation
There are still some redundancies in the net-
work after the elimination all possible connec-
tions being no latest first matches. For deadhead
trips, having enough time for temporarily return
to depot, we evaluate costs arising for such a
temporary return and compare them to costs of
directly connecting with a deadhead trip. In
case of positive cost savings by a depot-return we
eliminate this specific latest first match in our net-
work, guaranteeing the connection still by depot-
return.
4.1.4. Model reduction: Computational results
The total number of matches, which determines
the number of variables in connection-based net-
work models for MDVSP, depends quadratically
on the number of trips given by the timetable.
Table 1
Scale of problem reduction by the new formulation
Timetable Scheduled trips Stations Matches
T1 682 50 195,618
T2 2047 21 1,143,868
T3 3054 49 3,906,045
T4 7068 124 20,555,784
T1: regional bus company; T2–T4: urban.
1623
However, the number of first matches is limited
by the number of bus stations multiplied by the
number of timetabled trips. Since the number of
stations is always smaller than the number of trips,
we notice a crucial model reduction compared to
existing approaches. The last two aggregation
stages yield an additional strengthening of the
model size.
Table 1 illustrates the impact of the three-stage
aggregation process for timetables of some Ger-
man public transport companies. We define here
matches as possible connections between compati-
ble trips at different stations. The table shows
explicitly the number of matches, first matches,
and latest first matches. Furthermore, the right-
most column denotes the number of latest first
matches that are cheaper than traveling over de-
pot, thus leaving out the direct connection trips
that are dominated by trips over depot. The largest
reduction arises for urban timetables with short
distances between stations (see T2 to T4). Only
1% of the matches remain in the reduced set of lat-
est first matches. Even for the regional timetable
(T1), having long distances between stations, we
achieve a reduction of 97%.
4.2. Construction of the network
Because we have to assure that each bus returns
back to its original depot at the end of a day, we
need to distinguish between buses from different
home depots. Furthermore, certain trips have to
be taken over by buses of a group of given bus
types, so that we need to distinguish between bus
types as well. Therefore, we construct one network
layer for each depot-vehicle-type-combination,
called depot for simplicity, containing the follow-
ing arcs:
First matches Latest first matches Lfm not-over-depot
19,457 6292 6262 (3%)
42,863 17,791 11,885 (1%)
81,265 52,898 48,572 (1%)
513,393 246,580 213,433 (1%)
1624 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
• a loaded trip arc for each timetabled trip which
can be operated from this depot,
• deadhead arcs, according to latest first matches,
which are cheaper than temporarily return to
the depot, and
• pull-in/pull-out arcs to the depot after/before
each loaded trip.
For each station, including depots, we build a
connection line representing all possible arrival
and departure events at the given station—after
pre-sorting of arcs according to arrival/departure
time respectively.
One node of this network connects a group of
possible arrivals to the following group of possible
departures (see also Fig. 3). In this way all stations,
including depots, are represented as ordered sets of
(connection) nodes, linked together by waiting
arcs. On each layer, there is one circulation flow
arc connecting the last node of the depot line with
its first node. This arc is provided with fixed cost
for corresponding vehicle type and represents vehi-
cles parking over night in depot.
There are different ways to express the capacity
of a depot. Our approach incorporates the follow-
ing specific modeling approaches:
• We set flow upper bounds on circulation flow
arcs for capacities of depot-vehicle type
combinations.
• The number of parking slots in certain depots
generates additional restrictions in the mathe-
matical model formulation constraining the
sum of flow values on corresponding circulation
flow arcs.
• For a limited number of vehicles of certain
types we also constrain the sum of correspond-
ing flow values.
• If it is required to use a fixed number of buses of
certain type or of certain depot, we set a lower
bound equal to the upper bound (variable fixing
in mathematical model) on the corresponding
arc.
Waiting arcs together with arcs for unloaded
trips are also provided with corresponding opera-
tional costs. Upper bounds on the loaded trip-arcs
are equal to one.
In case of minimizing the number of buses be-
fore considering operational cost components as
an objective, we should choose the cost factors
properly: The costs on a circulation arc must be
large enough in comparison to the operational
costs (costs for deadheads) in order to induce the
effect of minimizing the number of buses.
Fig. 3 shows the complete time–space network
for the MDVSP—example from Fig. 1. Down to
the right a feasible and fleet-minimal solution is
given by some arcs. Flow values on these arcs
are equal to one; missing arcs from the above net-
work have a null-flow in this solution.
The resulting flow model contains one network
layer for each depot (as defined above), where 0/1-
variables on trip arcs and integral flow variables
on other arcs are defined. In addition to the flow
balance equations, it is required by cover con-
straints that for each scheduled trip the sum over
flow variables on the corresponding trip arcs of
all network layers is equal to one.
The optimal solution of the mathematical
model describes flow values in this network with
minimal total costs.
4.3. Decomposition of the aggregated flows
It is an important characteristic of the time–
space network formulation that due to the aggre-
gation of possible connections, any feasible flow,
including also an optimal flow, represents a bundle
or a class of vehicle schedules. All of them have
minimal total costs but different distributions of
waiting times. With the help of a suitable flow
decomposition procedure, we may extract a vehicle
schedule with an optimal flow and desired charac-
teristics. A large number of possible flow decom-
position algorithms may be constructed to
decompose a given optimal flow. For example,
the first-in-first-out (FIFO) strategy connects the
bus that arrived first with the trip that leaves first,
whereas the last-in-first-out (LIFO) strategy con-
nects the bus that arrived last with the trip that
leaves first, both strategies having specific typical
properties.
Fig. 5 demonstrates the number of choices in
the case that the flow of the given connection arc
has the value of three units in the optimal solution.
 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
3 flow units
Fig. 5. Degree of freedom in flow decomposition.
There are 3! = 6 variations to connect arrivals to
the departures.
5. Implementation and optimization runs
Based on the description given in the previous
section, our implementation of the time–space net-
work based solution procedure to solve a given
MDVSP involves the following steps:
• Read the data and construct the layers of a
time–space network.
• Create a mathematical model for min cost flow
with additional cover constraint for each
unloaded trip.
• Optimize the mixed-integer programming
model with standard software, and compute
an optimal flow representing a class of aggre-
gated schedules.
• Decompose this flow to rotations of one con-
crete optimal vehicle schedule, according to
LIFO, FIFO or any intermediate strategy.
In the context of a co-operation with the soft-
ware developer PTV AG, we designed and imple-
mented a software component which supports
public transport planners in constructing schedules
for buses. PTV AG provided us test instances of
several public transport companies. The largest
timetable (T4 in Table 1: City of Munich)
contains:
• 11.018 scheduled trips,
• 33 vehicle types in 8 groups,
• 24 depots, and
• results in 4 disjunctive MDVS problems; largest
problem has 7.068 scheduled trips and 124 end
stations.
1625
Table 2 summarizes the sizes of the mathemat-
ical models, objective values and optimization
times for 25 test instances based on three timeta-
bles. All solution times are shown in seconds of
CPU time on a 2.1 GHz processor using ILOG
CPLEX 8.0 as a standard optimization package.
Except for the larges problem instances, we also
received acceptable run times with the standard
optimizer MOPS (Suhl (2000)).
The number of depots means actually depot-
vehicle-type combinations, as mentioned above,
and thus corresponds to the terminology in Löbel
(1999). The given number of depots may be differ-
ent from the average depot group size—for such
cases we additionally provide the average depot
group size in parenthesis (last 10 instances). The
entry ‘‘3 (2.5)’’ means, that for a timetable-trip
on the average 2.5 different depot-assignments
are possible, although there are three depots in
the network.
Note that the number of trip matches in the
corresponding column gives a lower bound for
the number of variables in the existing
connection-based multi-commodity flow for-
mulation.
With the proposed modeling approach, we were
able to solve quite large problems in a reasonable
amount of time without special tuning of the used
optimization software. Despite the fact that this
problem is NP-hard, most of the solution time is
spent solving the first LP relaxation. Comparing
various LP solvers leads to the conclusion that
the barrier optimizer is the best choice to solve
large problems with many degrees of freedom for
each loaded trip.
This time–space network based model has a
very good MIP behavior; the IP-gap is infinitesi-
mal small or null, and almost all variables have
integer values in the optimal (basis) solution of
the LP-relaxation. The reason for this lies in the
model properties: because of the aggregation of
possible connections, the mathematical model
tends to use one general integer variable instead
of several binary variables. Thus, we practically
shift the corresponding decisions to the postpro-
cessing phase, where we construct an optimal vehi-
cle schedule from the optimal network flow via
flow decomposition.
 1626
Table 2
Computational results for timestables T2, T3 and T4
Instance Trip matches arcs Model size TS-MCF Obj./1000 MIP optimization time Best LP solver

N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627

(in seconds)
Trips Stop Depots* Trip First matches Latest first Rows · Cols · Nzs Network Dual Barrier Best time
points matches TS-MCF matches
MCF TS-MCF(d)
1 20,555,784 246,580 213,433 20,575 · 248,021 · 503,110 1,014,213 12 12 207 12 Dual = Network
2 41,111,568 493,160 432,737 34,072 · 501,903 · 1,017,942 1,014,110 136 150 1,313 136 Network
3 61,667,352 739,740 616,432 47,574 · 720,181 · 1,461,566 1,014,050 7079 4608 3435 3435 Barrier
4 82,223,136 986,320 825,624 60,690 · 963,175 · 1,954,622 1,013,999 24,762 10,030 5863 5863 Barrier
7.068 124 5 102,778,920 1,232,900 1,039,137 73,866 · 1,210,542 · 2,456,424 1,013,913 53,143 49,394 11,887 11,887 Barrier
1 3,906,045 52,898 48,572 9597 · 64,231 · 131,516 508,223 2 1 22 2 Dual
2 7,812,090 105,796 98,057 16,060 · 129,295 · 264,698 508,103 24 20 158 20 Dual
3 11,718,135 158,694 136,290 22,611 · 183,195 · 375,552 508,056 246 136 420 36 Dual
4 15,624,180 211,592 187,299 29,076 · 249,775 · 511,766 508,049 805 482 988 482 Dual
5 19,530,225 264,490 233,316 35,267 · 310,703 · 636,686 508,002 1106 646 1510 646 Dual
6 23,436,270 317,388 273,126 41,370 · 365,185 · 748,694 507,939 1115 858 1510 858 Dual
7 27,342,315 370,286 322,513 47,766 · 429,933 · 881,244 507,922 1448 1237 1826 1237 Dual
8 31,248,360 423,184 363,118 54,096 · 485,834 · 996,100 507,870 2039 1334 2568 1334 Dual
9 35,154,405 476,082 409,191 60,416 · 547,138 · 1,121,762 507,829 2617 2893 4126 2617 Network
3.054 49 10 39,060,450 528,980 450,937 66,747 · 604,151 · 1,238,842 507,822 3264 4423 3136 3136 Barrier
3 (2.5) 1,143,868 17,791 11,885 8798 · 27,599 · 58,485 421,582 4 4 15 4 Dual
6 (5) 2,115,896 34,955 23,118 14,997 · 53,249 · 113,039 421,545 37 40 67 37 Dual
9 (7.5) 3,397,601 52,864 40,813 21,939 · 87,128 · 184,111 421,544 148 106 146 106 Dual
12 (10) 4,754,636 70,882 56,101 29,031 · 118,768 · 250,675 421,537 371 271 244 244 Barrier
15 (12.5) 6,153,772 90,390 72,007 36,235 · 151,369 · 319,161 421,533 972 669 356 356 Barrier
18 (15) 7,473,783 108,458 85,873 43,232 · 181,409 · 382,525 421,531 1566 1179 824 824 Barrier
21 (17.5) 9,005,549 128,764 101,448 50,647 · 214,110 · 451,211 421,525 3385 1652 598 598 Barrier
24 (20) 10,468,848 148,143 119,162 57,841 · 248,580 · 523,435 421,521 2798 3099 568 568 Barrier
27 (22.5) 12,014,270 168,591 138,008 65,223 · 284,539 · 598,637 421,517 3708 3551 785 785 Barrier
2.047 21 30 (25) 13,558,845 188,927 157,526 72,636 · 321,198 · 675,239 421,516 6069 4689 905 905 Barrier
 N. Kliewer et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 175 (2006) 1616–1627
Several practical side constraints that could not
be addressed in this paper have been successfully
included into the software component, such as:
outsourcing of the parts of timetables to private
bus companies, returns to different depots, differ-
ent types of fleet size limitations, and so on.
6. Conclusion
We propose a new application of the time–space
network flow model for the vehicle scheduling
problem arising in public bus transport networks.
The model size has been substantially reduced
through aggregation of incoming and outgoing
arcs within each station, without loss of generality.
Thus, we were able to solve very large practical in-
stances to optimality through direct application of
standard optimization software. Many of these in-
stances were not solvable with any existing ap-
proach according the current state-of-the-art.
The main advantage of the time–space network
model is the reduction of the number of variables
in the exact optimization model. Inherently, there
is no straightforward way to explicitly model costs
of a given trip-to-trip connection within the aggre-
gated model. In bus scheduling case with linear
cost structures the individual connections of trips
or flights are not necessary, and therefore the
time–space network model is to be preferred to
the traditional connection based models.
1627
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