Railway operations management problems

Narayan Rangaraj
Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India

The talk gives an overview on a range of interesting problems and
decision areas in conventional rail systems, but also applicable to
metro rail operations, derived from examples in India, where rail is an
important mode of transport both for passenger and freight.  The
mathematical structure of some the problems is explored, emphasizing the
physical infrastructure capacity constrained nature of many planning
problems in this particular environment.  This leads to interesting
variants even for problems that are well understood and well studied. 
Attempts at problem structuring and some implementation issues are also
discussed.