The Computational Complexity of Delay Management

Abstract

Delay management for public transport consists of deciding whether vehicles should wait for delayed transferring passengers, with the objective of minimizing the overall passenger discomfort. This paper classifies the computational complexity of delay management problems with respect to various structural parameters, such as the maximum number of passenger transfers, the graph topology, and the capability of trains to reduce delays. Our focus is to distinguish between polynomially solvable and MediaObjects/InlineFigure1.png-complete problem variants. To that end, we show that even fairly restricted versions of the delay management problem are hard to solve.