Railway timetable rescheduling with flexible stopping and flexible short-turning during disruptions

Yongqiu Zhu and Rob M.P. Goverde

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2019, vol. 123, issue C, 149-181

Abstract: Railway operations are vulnerable to unexpected disruptions that should be handled in an efficient and passenger-friendly way. To this end, we propose a timetable rescheduling model where flexible stopping (i.e. skipping stops and adding stops) and flexible short-turning (i.e. full choice of short-turn stations) are innovatively integrated with three other dispatching measures: retiming, reordering, and cancelling. The Mixed Integer Linear Programming model also ensures that each train serving a station is ensured with a platform track. To consider the rescheduling impact on passengers, the weight of each decision is estimated individually according to the time-dependent passenger demand. The objective is minimizing passenger delays. A case study is carried out for hundreds of disruption scenarios on a subnetwork of the Dutch railways. It is found that (1) applying a mix of flexible stopping and flexible short-turning results in less passenger delays; (2) shortening the recovery duration mitigates the post-disruption consequence by less delay propagation but is at the expense of more cancelled train services during the disruption; and (3) the optimal rescheduling solution is sensitive to the disruption duration, but some steady behaviour is observed when the disruption duration increases by the timetable cycle time.

Keywords: Railways; Disruption management; Timetable rescheduling; Flexible stopping; Flexible short-turning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2019.02.015

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