Line Planning in Public Transport: Bypassing Line Pool Generation

Abstract: Line planning, i.e. choosing paths which are operated by one vehicle end-to-end, is an important aspect of public transport planning. While there exists heuristic procedures for generating lines from scratch, most theoretical observations consider the problem of choosing lines from a predefined line pool. In this paper, we consider the complexity of the line planning problem when all simple paths can be used as lines. Depending on the cost structure, we show that the problem can be NP-hard even for paths and stars and that no polynomial time approximation of sub-linear performance is possible. Additionally, we identify polynomially solvable cases and present a pseudo-polynomial solution approach for trees.