VS-OPT solves vehicle rotation problems nearly optimal even for the largest public transit companies. We have published the optimal solution of a vehicle rotation problem with 28,000 timetabled trips, 10 depots, 14 vehicle types and up to 100 million deadhead trips. At such scenarios, VS-OPT convinces with short running times of a few minutes on of-the-shelf PC’s. Already more than 100 traffic companies, spread all over the world, rely on this system.

R-OPT solves scheduling problems in rail transport. At the same time, R-OPT optimizes the vehicle rotations, the maintenance of the vehicles and the train formation for operational planning. In addition to vehicle and travel costs, the stability of the timetable is also optimized. R-OPT thereby takes into account many operational restrictions, e.g. infrastructure capacities as well as guidelines on the alignment and positioning of individual vehicles in train composition.

Duty scheduling in public transport companies is a highly complex planning problem. To create daily duties, which can be carried out by individual employees, is subject to various and complicated rules from laws, regulations, tariffs and company agreements. Since 2001 DS-OPT has been used to plan duties for bus drivers, train drivers, train crew and ship personnel in many companies around the world.

The fully integrated optimization of vehicles and duties considerably simplifies the planning process especially for regional public transport companies and shows additional optimization potential. Vehicle and Duty planning are two of the most important operational planning steps in public transport. These two planning steps determine the efficiency of the use of the most important two resources of transport companies: drivers and vehicles.

DR-OPT is an optimization kernel for calculating duty rosters for anonymous personnel. In duty rostering, existing (daily) duties are combined into duty sequences that are either cyclic or can span over a planning horizon of several weeks. A balanced rostering of duties is crucial to the employee’s satisfaction.

The planning of electric buses presents public transport companies with new challenges. An electric bus normally does not manage its daily workload without charging, which is why the charging processes must be taken into account in the schedule. At the same time, electric buses are more expensive than diesel buses, so efficient vehicle schedules are extremely important. ES-OPT is our new optimizer for the scheduling of electric buses with all their special features.