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Trains do not vanish: the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2014

  • Rolling Stock Unit Management
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Abstract

The ROADEF/EURO challenge is a contest jointly organized by the French Operational Research and Decision Aid society (ROADEF) and the European Operational Research society (EURO). The contest has appeared on a regular basis since 1999 and always concerns an applied optimization problem proposed by an industrial partner. The 2014 edition of the ROADEF/EURO challenge was led by the Innovation & Research department of SNCF, a global leader in passenger and freight transport services, and infrastructure manager of the French railway network. The objective of the challenge was to find the best way to store and move trains on large railway sites, between their arrivals and departures. Since trains never vanish and traffic continues to increase, in recent years some stations have been having real congestion issues. Train management in large railway sites is of high interest for SNCF, which is why it was submitted to the operations research community as the industrial problem for the 2014 edition of the ROADEF/EURO challenge. This paper introduces the special section of the Annals of Operations Research volume devoted to the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2014, as well as the methods of the finalist teams and their results.

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Acknowledgements

The authors warmly thank the SNCF expert group for their high involvement in the challenge subject definition, as well as the IT department who implemented the solution checker. Special thanks are addressed to Nicolas Marcos, who brought a major contribution to this challenge.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LAAS-CNRS, Universit de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France

    Christian Artigues

  2. Université Montpellier, LIRMM, 161 rue Ada, 34392, Montpellier cedex 5, France

    Eric Bourreau

  3. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble, INP, G-SCOP, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Vincent Jost

  4. Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR 7606, LIP6, 75005, Paris, France

    Safia Kedad-Sidhoum

  5. SNCF Innovation & Research, 75611, Paris Cedex 12, France

    François Ramond

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  1. Christian Artigues
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  2. Eric Bourreau
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  3. Vincent Jost
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  4. Safia Kedad-Sidhoum
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  5. François Ramond
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Correspondence to Christian Artigues.

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Artigues, C., Bourreau, E., Jost, V. et al. Trains do not vanish: the ROADEF/EURO challenge 2014. Ann Oper Res 271, 1091–1105 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-018-3066-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-018-3066-x

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