|
On 14 April 2008, Netherlands Railways (NS) has been awarded the 2008 Franz Edelman Award with "The New Dutch Timetable: The O.R. Revolution”. NS was awarded the prize for the application of operations research and analytics to rescheduling the heavily used Dutch commuter rail system.
The volume of traffic on the Dutch passenger railway network had increased significantly, from 8.0 billion passenger kilometers in 1970 to 15.4 billion passenger kilometers in 2006. More and larger trains had been scheduled without changing the structure of the timetable, which caused an overload of the system in peak hours.
A team of logistics experts and mathematicians at NS and RSM Erasmus University constructed an improved timetable. The timetable, introduced in December 2006, proved a success by a number of measures. Punctuality improved from 84.8 % in 2006 to 88.4 % in the first quarter of 2008. Customer satisfaction surveys in 2007 showed a higher customer satisfaction than ever and passenger demand has increased by 15% on some lines.
These more efficient schedules and the increased number of passengers resulted in an additional annual profit of € 40 million (£31.6 million) in 2007 with more profit growth expected in coming years.
NS competed against the Federal Aviation Administration; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Norwegian team of StatOil/Hydro and Gassco; the city of Stockholm, Sweden; and Xerox in the finals of the 2008 Franz Edelman Award Competition.
Past Franz Edelman winners have included Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Canadian Pacific Railway, GM, and IBM.
The Franz Edelman competition recognizes outstanding examples of operations research (O.R.)-based projects that have transformed companies, entire industries, and people's lives. The competition attests to the contributions of operations research in the profit and non-profit sectors. The Franz Edelman Award is presented by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).
|
