Coordinated railway traffic rescheduling with the Resource Conflict Graph model

Abstract

The train rescheduling problem is quite a popular topic in the railway research community. Many approaches are available to reschedule traffic in a network partition, but very few works address the coordination of these partitions. In railway systems with very dense traffic, e.g. the Swiss one, it is not always possible to partition the network such that local rescheduling algorithms can work completely independently one from another. This paper proposes a coordination approach for adjacent local rescheduling algorithms. These algorithms are based on the Resource Conflict Graph model, which enables the representation of the interlocking system at a very fine granularity. Simulations on data from the Swiss Federal Railways show the validity of this approach to improve the consistency of decisions at the common boundaries of adjacent local rescheduling algorithms.