On a Rail Transportation Model with Scheduled Services

Süleyman Özekici and Selim Şengör
Additional contact information
Süleyman Özekici: Department of Industrial Engineering, Bog̃aziçi University, Bebek, 80815 Istanbul, Turkey
Selim Şengör: Department of Industrial Engineering, Bog̃aziçi University, Bebek, 80815 Istanbul, Turkey

Transportation Science, 1994, vol. 28, issue 3, 246-255

Abstract: A safety precaution used in rail transportation is to ensure that only one train occupies the track connecting two stations at any time. We consider a train station where passengers arrive according to a prescheduled timetable, and the transportation authority tries to dispatch the trains on their scheduled departure times. However, if the track to the next station is occupied by a preceding train at such a departure instant, then the departure of the next train is delayed, or even cancelled, to achieve safety in transportation. Under such circumstances, the dispatcher may choose to cancel overdelayed trains intentionally so that the succeeding trains can depart on time, or to dispatch some trains with faster speed to decrease service time. We analyze this rail transportation model to identify the relationships between various dispatching strategies, the arrival pattern of the passengers, and the performance measures involving the service delay and passenger waiting time. The steady-state distribution of the service delay is characterized as the solution of a system of linear equations and an explicit computational formula for the average passenger waiting time is derived. Interesting intuitive and counterintuitive examples are also provided in the context of an optimal dispatching problem.

Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.28.3.246 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ortrsc:v:28:y:1994:i:3:p:246-255

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Transportation Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().