Modeling Optimization on Ticket Gate Assignment Problem for Large Railway Passenger Station

With the minimization of passengers’ total distance as the objective function, and whether a train is assigned to a ticket gate as a logical decision variable, a 0-1 mathematical programming model is proposed considering checking facilities’ utilization. Two methods of solving this model are put forward in this paper where a transformed model is reformulated to suit mature optimization software based on time discretization and another approach is based on discrete event simulation using heuristic rule. Taking ticket gate assignment problem of trains on a certain day at Nanchang station as case, results show that the two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. Calling CPLEX solver in GAMS can get the global optimal solution of a small scale problem, but it takes a long time, and even cannot solve the large scale problem. The discrete events simulation approach is time saving, while it can only obtain suboptimal solutions. The comparison of the optimization results in the large scale train ticket gate allocation using discrete event simulation method with the existing allocations show that this method is effective and feasible.