Operational Planning of Passenger Trains in Indian Railways

We designed, developed, and implemented an optimization-based DSS to facilitate operational planning of passenger trains on Indian Railways. Implementing our DSS in an organization that has 1.6 million regular employees was very frustrating, and success did not come easily. Two zonal railways have already implemented the DSS, and both report many direct and indirect benefits. Another railway has used our model to analyze its operations, but implementation is pending. The passenger cars and locomotives saved by our model can be used to replenish spare stock or to form new trains to provide new services to meet the ever increasing demand of passenger traffic.