I’m having trouble understanding how that relates to the statement about train operators, the ones actually driving the trains because most trains are not autonomous.
Comment on Someone should really develop this idea
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days agoUp until very recently all train route planning in Sweden was done manually with huge sheets of paper and rulers. Scheduling trains is a very hard problem due to the inability for one train to pass another in many places and the constantly high congestion. Any change in the schedule affects everything.
In computer science it belongs to the class of “NP-hard” problems which are essentially intractable to solve optimally. There are various approximate methods that can be employed to get something that’s almost always good enough.
kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
8oow3291d@feddit.dk 2 days ago
Just because it is a hard problem, it doesn’t mean it is easier to do with paper and rulers than with algorithms. So the problem being “hard” should be unrelated to Sweden being behind the times.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
The problem with train scheduling is that computers don’t just make it better. There’s a very real chance computers could make it worse or result in approximately the same outcome but not require millions in investment into a new system.