Customer-oriented line planning

An important strategic element in the planning process of public transportation is the development of a line concept, i. e. to find a set of paths for operating lines on them. So far, the models in the literature aim to minimize the costs or to maximize the number of direct travelers. In this thesis we present a new approach minimizing the travel times over all customers including penalties for the transfers needed which is shown to be NP-hard. This approach maximizes the comfort of the passengers and will make the resulting timetable more reliable. To tackle our problem we present integer programming models and suggest various solution heuristics as well as a solution approach using Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition for solving the LP-relaxation. Numerical results of real-world instances are presented.