[gregsq]

It’s a research field in the UK at least. For the UK’s extensive rail network.

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/railway/index.aspx

Edit:

Further symposium on this subject.

https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/mathematics/news-and-ev...

[nicklecompte]

The symposium certainly sounds interesting. Looking at the talks, I am struck by the major separation between talks about tropical algebra and talks about railway optimization.

But the point of our comments is that this is a new research field, with very little proven application, and chastising railway middle managers for not following these deeply technical and somewhat esoteric developments is silly. It’s like getting on to a manger at Intel because they are unfamiliar with the architecture of photonic quantum computers.

[gregsq]

There are financial incentives to solve scheduling issues in the UK. Trains must meet a schedule within time limits. Failure to maintain reliability at a regulatory 90.9% can mean the loss of the license to operate.

The UK interconnects with European networks via Eurostar, and the major hubs feed it. The tube runs trains every minute or two so connecting between these hubs, for example Waterloo to Kings Cross isn’t usually an issue. But arriving late at a hub can be very disruptive.

Middle managers, in europe generally, focused on targets don’t need to understand the math, but are in a competitive market that can require mathematicians to model and solve scheduling issues.

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2018/05/tropical_mathem...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/late-network...