ECOPT intends to organize several small workshops with both a scientific speaker and a speaker from practice throughout the year. The next workshop takes place on Thursday, October 4, 2018, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Speakers and program

The speakers in this workshop are:

• Markus Friedrich (University of Stuttgart)
• Thijs Rensink (Netherlands Railways)
• Gabor Maroti (Netherlands Railways & Vrij Universiteit Amsterdam)

The program is as follows.

Abstracts

Markus Friedrich: Modeling Vehicle Sharing with Driverless Cars and Impacts on Urban Transport

Autonomous vehicles (= AV) enabling driverless transport may change the ways of traveling and traffic volumes dramatically. To estimate potential impacts of AV on traffic in an urban area nine scenarios are examined, varying the rate of carsharing, ridesharing and the availability of rail services. The number of required vehicles, vehicle kilometers and the necessary number of parking spaces quantify each scenario.

The study builds on an existing travel demand model of the Stuttgart Region. An algorithm extends this model for bundling person trips in ridesharing systems and by an algorithm for vehicle blocking. The results show that the size of the car fleet can be reduced considerably. The vehicle kilometers traveled in the network, can only be reduced in cases where most travelers use ridesharing instead of carsharing or privately owned cars. However, an increase of the car kilometers traveled is more likely and may lead to a lower quality of traffic flow.

Thijs Rensink and Gabor Maroti: Railway rolling stock scheduling by optimising seat probability

We present a new approach in rolling stock scheduling where the stochastic nature of the passenger demand is captured, as opposed the traditional way that works with simplified deterministic passenger demand figures.  The stochastic demand model relies on accurate forecasts drawn from the smart card data, and gives rise to novel measure for service quality, such as to the seat probability.  In fact, seat probability is one of the main KPIs in the contract between Netherlands Railways (NS) and the Dutch state.

In the first part of this talk we discuss what seat probability is all about and how it can be incorporated into the mathematical optimization model of TAM, the in-house developed rolling stock optimization tool of NS.  The second part of the talk is devoted to the lessons learned when implementing and using seat probability optimization in practice.  In turns out that, by optimizing for seat probability, the service quality can be improved by 5-10%, in some cases even by 15%, without raising operational costs.

Practical information

Venue: EUR campus Woudestein, Van der Goot Building, M1-08. Directions on how to get to the campus and a map of the campus can be found here. 

Registration: Participation in the workshop is free. However, only a limited number of places are available. Therefore, we ask you to register for the workshop by sending an email to dollevoet@ese.eur.nl. Registrations will be served on a first-come-first-serve basis.