Generating optimal schedules for an underground railway line

The problem of building train schedules for an underground railway line to improve the quality of the service offered to passengers, taking into account safety constraints, is considered. To this end, a mathematical optimization problem is defined and solved. However, the proposed solution methodology, as others provided in the literature, is not suitable in the case of nonsmooth passenger arrival rates. Then, a new heuristic capable of generating train schedules even in such a situation is developed, and some experimental results are shown.