Air-rail timetable synchronisation: Improving passenger connections in Europe within and across transportation modes

This study addresses the integration of the railway and airline scheduling problems, in order to offer passengers smooth transfers between rail and air. This paper focuses on optimising the air and rail timetables at 18 major European airports including three hubs and their associated train stations. A multimodal passenger demand simulation, using constraint programming and based on real data, is proposed. A typical week, from Monday to Saturday, of December 2019 is analysed. Ten passenger demand simulations are run for each day, resulting in 60 test instances that are publicly released. The air-rail timetable synchronisation is applied to these 60 instances. Three scenarios are tested in which each operator agrees to change its schedule or not. Results show that changing the schedule of only 13% of European flights by 11 min, and half of trains scheduled to stop at the three hubs of 17 min, on average, could increase the number of suitable connections for passengers by 60%. In addition, if both airlines and railway operators adapt their schedules, passenger comfort is improved and operator costs are reduced, even more so than with unilateral changes.