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VDM Verlagsservicegesellschaft mbH, Germany (ISBN 978-3-8383-3849-1)
This monograph presents a framework for optimum design of timetables to maximise schedule robustness and minimise resource deployment, especially for large railway networks, wherein the problem has been formulated as a multi-objective non-linear model. The monograph's contribution is the formulation of methods to reduce the problem size to computationally manageable proportions, and thus enable planners to undertake network-wide optimisation studies. The monograph demonstrates that the design of timetables can be spread over a canvas incorporating not only over the entire railway network, thus enabling study of the mutual interactions across the network, but also involving the optimisation of crew and rolling stock in the purview of the model. This can thus emulate the planning process more truthfully, wherein piecemeal optimisations are of little import. This monograph should be especially useful for researchers engaged in problems pertaining to railway networks, railway network planners, railway decision support software developers or one interested in industrial applications of operations research.
About the Author:
Bodhibrata Nag is an Associate Professor of the Operations Management Group at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where he teaches Operations Research, Operations & Supply Chain Management and Project Management. His research interests include applications of Operations Research in areas of logistics, transportation, energy, supply chain management and the public sector. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras with a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering. He received his doctorate in Operations Research and Systems Analysis from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He has nearly two decades of experience in the energy and transportation industry and academia, having served in senior positions in the Indian Railways and the Central Electricity Authority. He has been trained in case study method of teaching and case development at the Harvard Business School. He has been a visiting research faculty at the Industrial and Operations Engineering Department of the University Of Michigan and the Decision Systems Group of BNSF Railway as a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow. He has received several teaching awards. He has authored a book Optimal Design of Timetables for Large Railways and co-authored the Special Indian Edition of Hillier & Lieberman’s classic textbook, Introduction to Operations Research.