Considering a dynamic impact zone for real-time railway traffic management

Sofie Van Thielen, Francesco Corman and Pieter Vansteenwegen

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2018, vol. 111, issue C, 39-59

Abstract: In a railway system, a conflict occurs when two trains require the same part of the infrastructure at the same time. Currently, such conflicts are typically resolved manually by experienced dispatchers. However, it is impossible for them to fully anticipate the impact of their actions on the entire network. This paper proposes a conflict prevention strategy which focuses only on the relevant part of the network and traffic and, consequently, proposes a solution for that part only. The proposed strategy first looks for possible rerouting options by using an optimization model. If no solution is found, a solution based on delaying one of the trains is required. This retiming/reordering heuristic uses information from an offline calculation, for determining related conflicts that frequently occur. In this way, a so-called dynamic impact zone is created online for each conflict. When deciding which train to delay, the potential conflicts and the incurred delays of all trains in this dynamic impact zone are taken into account.

Keywords: Conflict prevention; Dispatching; Traffic management system; Real-time scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2018.03.003

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