Carmen is developing a new Rolling Stock planning system for DSB (Danish State Railways). The system that is being delivered represents a new generation of Carmen’s rail fleet product, Carmen Fleet.

The big challenge for DSB and Carmen has been to streamline DSB’s planning processes, yet allocate rolling stock resources in the most optimal way. According to Tarben Olesen, Project Leader at DSB, “DSB want to evaluate more scenarios faster, create plans closer to day of operations, and reduce cost of rolling stock by at least 3 per cent.”

DSB currently run most of the rail traffic within Denmark, including the commuter trains in the greater Copenhagen area. DSB is also expanding their operation to new geographical areas as the rail business of Europe becomes more and more deregulated.

“The new rolling stock planning system is key in all of the above plans,” said Tarben Olesen. “It has to manage all sorts of details to support experienced planners with the highest quality solutions for the domestic DSB traffic that includes locomotives, cars and multiple units. Along with this it has to handle the special considerations related to the commuter traffic of DSB S-tog in Copenhagen, and it must support DSB in making correct and competitive bids for new contracts all over Europe.”

The possibility of bidding for foreign traffic creates new demands on the business and planning departments of all rail operators, and thus on Carmen Fleet.

A new traffic bid means that all prerequisites are new and the information must be quickly modelled and correctly entered into the system. Everything that affects the plan must be easily configurable, and many different types of rail traffic operations must be possible to plan. This means that it is no longer possible to base planning and cost estimates on historical rules-of-thumb or planning from previous years.

According to Erik Hasselberg, Product Manager and head of the DSB delivery at Carmen, “One of the biggest demands from DSB for this project was that the optimizer must produce high quality results in a short period of time which can be analyzed and then quickly delivered to the operations department at DSB,” he said.

“The planning also needs to be easily integrated with the surrounding processes such as timetable construction and crew planning. These new drivers in rail planning are the foundations for the new Carmen Fleet functionality.”

Tarben Olesen concluded, “Carmen’s rolling stock optimization is expected to become an important tool for increasing efficiency at DSB. We expect the system to increase the quality of DSB’s rolling stock scheduling in Denmark, and internationally.”