Railway Products

Paper planning boards are a thing of the past - Carmen is your future

The amount of information processed by a railway's planning department is immense, to say the least. Still, a large amount of crew and locomotive planning is completely manual.

All products from Carmen Systems share a common bond - they are educationally designed and user-friendly. They give you a complete view over the entire planning process - right on your computer screen. The planning cycle takes less time, is more current and easier to adapt to changing circumstances.

Carmen solves complex planning problems and helps you on the way to a more effective, simpler and more flexible planning process.


Carmen's crew planning tool lets you conduct more business with the same staff

Carmen Pairing is your tool for creating, optimizing, and maintaining crew schedules. The goal is to man all trains while minimizing the total number of working days.

Carmen Pairing gives you performance. The system is loaded with funtionality to deal with the most complex and difficult aspects of schedule construction. It produces the optimum operational solutions for scheduling large traffic volumes with many crew bases. You can minimize the number of operational crew changes by creating solutions for different crew categories simultaneously. Another sophisticated feature is the possibility to specify base constraints on a day-by-day basis. If a new crew base is phased in, the optimizer can create a monthly solution that increases productivity at this base throughout the month.

Carmen Pairing allows you to simplify and enrich planning work while designing the optimum crew schedules. You can simulate, analyze and compare different situations to find the optimal solution for each scenario. The system is both user-friendly and cost-effective, but the benefits are more than just financial. Carmen Pairing offers many resource-saving functions, e.g. performs efficiency calculations and presents every imaginable statistic.

The user-friendly design gives the planner a flexible, complete view over the different scheduling phases. Now you can save money while improving working conditions at the same time. And with Carmen Pairing, you're always �up-to-date�, because the system works according to the current situations and conditions.


Carmen's locomotive optimization system - Carmen Fleet

Carmen Fleet is a vehicle planning system that solves the fleet assignment and the vehicle rotation problem. The system uses automatic optimizing algorithms and interactive graphical tools. The first version of the product has been developed for the Swedish Railways (SJ), who will take the system into production by the end of 1997. Serious and extensive tests at SJ have already shown that the system saves several percent in the number of locomotives needed compared to manually constructed plans.


Main characteristics

In short, Carmen Fleet does three things:

  • It chooses what vehicle type (which fleet) to use on each trip.
  • It decides how many vehicles to use on each trip.
  • It constructs the vehicle rotations.

    • This is done utilizing advanced optimization techniques so that cost is minimized, and without violating any of the restrictions that are defined by the user. The system minimizes the number of vehicles used within the planning horizon, but other costs can also be considered, e.g. costs of short connections, or the cost of using more vehicles than necessary on a trip (applicable for railway problems).

    The product can be used for tactical and operational planning. When used as a tactical decision support tool, weekly cyclic plans are created and various scenarios are tested where the timetable, the costs, connection times, etc. are varied. Operational plans are constructed on dated timetables.

    The system contains tools to take care of irregularities in the timetable, to repair operational plans and to handle timetables changes.


    Shorter planning cycles

    With Carmen Fleet the time needed for producing vehicle rotations is reduced dramatically compared to manual planning. This means much to the planning process of a large transportation company.

    Carmen Fleet users can participate in the process of constructing a new timetable by delivering reports and giving immediate answers on economical and operational consequences of timetable proposals.

    In fact, the product can deliver a result to a weekly problem with 4000 tasks in less than five minutes. If the complete problem is launched, where the assignment problem of multiple vehicle types are considered, the execution time will be a few hours. The execution time increases linearly with the number of tasks and the number of engine types.


    Maximal flexibility

    All constraints and costs are described with a specialized computer language, the Carmen Rule Language. This makes it possible for an end user to change all costs and constraints of the problem and to have full control of how the network of vehicle connections is defined.

    The system also includes an interactive, graphical module where the user can make manual changes to the schedule, define and print reports on statistics and costs, and analyse and look at the schedule in different graphical views.

    It is an important quality of the system that the user can control all input and easily try out different scenarios by making simulated changes to the timetable, or by varying costs and other parameters that may influence the resulting schedule and total costs.