EMU circulation planning for Silesian Railways: case study and a quantum approach

We study daily rolling stock circulation planning for electric multiple units (EMUs) on a regional passenger network, focusing on services where identical EMUs may be coupled in pairs on selected routes. Motivated by the operational needs of the regional operator Silesian Railways in Poland, we formulate an acyclic mixed-integer linear program on a one-day horizon that incorporates depot balance constraints, demand-driven seat and bicycle capacity limits, and simple crew availability constraints. Using a graph/hyper-graph representation of train movements, we first solve an ILP formulation. We then derive a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) reformulation and evaluate its solution by quantum annealing on D-Wave Advantage systems and by the classical quantum-inspired VeloxQ solver. In computational experiments on real-world instances from the Silesian network, with up to 404 train trips and 11 EMU types, the ILP approach yields high-quality daily circulation plans within at most about 40 minutes. The quantum and quantum-inspired solvers are restricted to substantially smaller sub-instances due to the large number of terms in the QUBO and embedding limitations in the case of quantum hardware. These results quantify the present frontier of QUBO-based methods for rolling stock circulation. They can be helpful in designing a hybrid classical-quantum approach.