Disjoint congruence classes and a timetabling application

We consider a combinatorial problem motivated by a special simplified timetabling problem for subway networks. Mathematically the problem is to find (pairwise) disjoint congruence classes modulo certain given integers; each such class corresponds to the arrival times of a subway line of a given frequency. For a large class of instances we characterize when such disjoint congruence classes exist and how they may be determined. We also study a generalization involving a minimum distance requirement between congruence classes, and a comparison of different frequency families in terms of their “efficiency”. Finally, a general method based on integer programming is also discussed.