Responsable: Juan Antonio Mesa López-Colmenar
Tipo de Proyecto/Ayuda: 6º Programa Marco de la U.E.
Referencia: FP6-021235-2
Web: http://cordis.europa.eu/projects/rcn/80443_en.html
Fecha de Inicio: 01-02-2006
Fecha de Finalización: 31-05-2009

Empresa/Organismo financiador/es:

• Commission of the European Communities (Research Directorate-General)

Socios:

• Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (Christos Zaroliagis)
• Universitaet Karlsruhe (Dorothea Wagner)
• Erasmus University Rotterdam (Leo Gijsbert Kroon)
• Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zuerich (Peter Widmayer)
• Universita degli Studi di l-Aquila (Gabriele Di Stefano)
• Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Leen Stougie)
• Technische Universitaet Berlin (Rolf H. Moehring)
• Universitá di Bologna (Paolo Toth)
• Università degli Studi di Padova (Matteo Fischetti)
• Georg-August-Universitaet Goettingen (Anita Schoebel)
• Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Federico Barber)
• Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais SNCF (Christina Weber)

Equipo:

• Investigadores:
  • Ricardo García Ródenas
  • Antonio José Lozano Palacio
  • Ángel Marín Gracia
  • Francisco Alonso Ortega Riejos

Becarios:

• Nombramiento de Becario:
  • Manuel Ordóñez Sánchez
  • Federico Perea Rojas-Marcos
  • Alicia de Los Santos Pineda

Resumen del proyecto:

Algorithmic methods have reached a state of maturity as a consequence of decades of research where real-world problems were posed to the algorithms community triggering important developments in the field. Despite this success, the current state of algorithmic research still faces severe difficulties, or cannot cope at all, with highly complex and data-intensive applications as those dealing with optimisation issues in large-scale communication and transportation networks. The complexity and size of such optimisation problems pose new challenges for algorithmic research, and their efficient solution requires a radically new foundational paradigm.

In this project, we are interested in establishing such a new paradigm and considerably advance the current state of algorithmic research by attacking optimisation questions in perhaps the most complex and largest in scale (transportation) setting: that of railway systems. Railway optimisation deals with planning and scheduling problems over several time horizons. We focus on two important and actually unexplored facets of planning that pose even harder optimisation questions: robust planning and online (real-time) planning. These two, tightly coupled, facets constitute a proactive and a reactive approach, respectively, to deal with disruptions to the normal operation.

Our main goal is to develop the necessary foundational algorithmic research in order to provide ingenious and sound answers to the fundamental efficiency and quality issues encapsulated in robust and online planning of complex, large-scale systems as those in railways. We will endeavour to develop a thorough understanding of the fundamental issues that make robust and online railway optimisation problems hard and to subsequently develop new algorithmic and complexity principles to deal with hardness through an integrated, interdisciplinary approach drawn from algorithmic, operations research, and constraint programming techniques.