To enable a seamless passenger experience in Europe and to be aligned with the EU policy on smart and sustainable mobility, the development of a multimodal network is necessary. Amongst other aspects such as luggage service, integrated ticketing, disruption management and guarantee in case of missed connections, timetable synchronisation at the network level is important to offer more and better (more efficient) options to passengers, reducing their total travel time.

Taking as inputs existing timetables and the expected demand level for each path on the network, the schedule design solution will enable the coordinated design of air and rail schedules, optimising the waiting times at transfer nodes in order to minimise the overall passenger journey times and the impacts of everyday stochastic disruptions, while taking into account the resources available to airlines and railway undertakings. Different levels of modifications to existing schedules can be taken into account, following a synchronisation strategy that allows time shifts, new services, cancellations or rerouting. Similarly, several objective functions can be applied, prioritising passenger-centric measures such as the minimisation of travel time, waiting time and demand rejection or operator-centric indicators through the minimisation of shift from the origin timetables or the operating costs.

The outcome of the schedule design solution will be a set of schedules for air and rail to be evaluated by the performance assessment solution.

The results of the experiments conducted for the solution will be relevant for the decision process of future policies and the integration of multimodality. Moreover, the schedule design solution could serve as a basis to define a multimodal scheduler at a network level.