A peak period heuristic for the Train Unit Assignment Problem

Train operators are responsible for the scheduling of train units on every trip they carry out. They have to decide the train unit decomposition that can suffice the demand of seats on every trip. This problem is known as the Train Unit Assignment Problem. This thesis is concerned with solving this problem, by first testing the effective peak period heuristic opposed in Cacchiani et al. (2019). The heuristic is finetuned by analyzing the best settings in the heuristic, for the instances used in this thesis. Thereafter, this thesis gives three improvements to the heuristic that strongly decrease the runtime. One improvement is suggested in particular, because it excels in terms of runtime.