Abstract

Effective commuting is an important part of regional development and attractiveness, where railway traffic is a favourable mode of transportation owing to it being energy efficient and environmentally friendly. Attaining more people to choose the train to commute is therefore desirable. A concept aiming to increase the use of railway traffic is cyclic timetable. At present the concept is most frequently used on a national level but there are possibilities to implement the ideas more regionally.The purpose of this thesis is to study if and how a cyclic timetable for railway traffic can be optimised for a region, more specifically the region “Fyra mälarstäder”. Challenges, but also opportunities, to implement this type of timetable on a regional level are also discussed.In order to construct a timetable for railway traffic several infrastructural limitations must be taken into account. An example that extensively limits railway capacity is single tracks. Hence, to be able to optimise the timetable these limitations were formulated, together with a number of other criteria, mathematically as constraints for an optimisation problem. For the optimisation setup the objective function consisted of a sum of weighted trip times within the system, which in turn was minimised.Results conclude that a cyclic timetable could successfully be used for “Fyra Mälarstäder”. However, some aspects remain to be investigated, including train line continuation beyond the system boundaries of the study. As for the optimisation, it appears that the weighting of the objective function plays a considerable role to obtain a satisfying timetable. Varying and adjusting certain parameters may also be favourable to achieve a timetable as beneficial as possible.