BMBF Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung

Research-Campus MODAL

Deutsche Bahn (Public Transport)

Deutsche Bahn:

Company: Deutsche Bahn (DB) is the Germany’s major railway company. It transports on average 5.4 million customers every day.

Project: You will learn to think about the railway network at DB from a planner’s perspective. Making up ICE rotations sounds easy at first, but you will soon find out that a lot of constraints have to be taken into account and do not forget about the size of Germany’s rail network!

Hosting Lab

The RailLab located at Zuse Institute cooperates with DB Fernverkehr to develop an optimization core that helps to operate the Intercity-Express (ICE), Germany’s fastest and most prestigious train, in the most efficient way. This is achieved by determining how the ICEs should rotate within Germany and, thereby, reducing the number of empty trips. The software has now been deployed in production at DB Fernverkehr for several years.

Sponsor

Deutsche Bahn (DB) is the Germany’s major railway company. It transports on average 5.4 million customers every day over a rail network that consists of 33,500 km of track, and 5,645 train stations. DB operates in over 130 countries world-wide. It provides its customers with mobility and logistical services, and operates and controls the related rail, road, ocean and air traffic networks.

Project

You will learn to think about railway networks from a planner’s perspective. Making up ICE rotations sounds easy at first, but you will soon find out that a lot of constraints have to be taken into account and do not forget about the size of Germany’s rail network! This makes finding and understanding suitable mathematical programming models a difficulty of its own. It will be your daily business to deal with huge data sets. You will write scripts to process the data and extract useful information. The past project assignments included to find out how robust optimization methodology can be incorporated in the optimization process and to develop a rotation plan for the situation that a restricted amount of train conductors is available, e.g. in a strike scenario.

Requirements

The prospective participant should:

  • have a good command of a high-level programming language (preferably C++) and experience in writing scripts, e.g. in Python or Shell,
  • have attended classes in the area of combinatorial optimization, linear and integer programming or acquired the foundations of this field by some other means
  • be prepared to work with huge datasets from industry partners (which involves cleaning and preprocessing to overcome inconsistencies and incompleteness).

Ideally he or she

  • is familiar with procedures in the area of rail traffic and/or logistics,
  • has experience in working in a Linux/Unix environment and
  • collaborative work on source code (e.g. working with revision control systems).