Service-oriented train timetabling problem with consideration of women-only passenger cars

Aiming to provide particular services for some special passenger demands, this paper first proposes a new method for the train timetabling problem with consideration of women-only passenger cars (WPC) on a metro line. A simulation-based model is formulated for this problem by considering two types of carriages (i.e., general passenger cars (GPC) and WPC) on each train and defining specific rules for the boarding/alighting behavior of male and female passengers. To ensure that female passengers can be serviced by WPC as much as possible, the objective function of the proposed method is to minimize the total waiting time of passengers and the number of female passengers boarding GPC. A heuristic algorithm is specifically designed to find the near optimal solutions for the proposed problem. Finally, several numerical experiments are implemented on the Beijing metro Yizhuang line to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods. The computational results show that the timetable generated by the proposed methods always has a much better performance with respect to providing special services for female passengers than that of the timetable generated without considering WPC.