Modeling the influence of disturbances in high-speed railway systems

Abstract

Accurately forecasting the influence of disturbances in High-Speed Railways (HSR) has great significance for improving real-time train dispatching and operation management. In this paper, we show how to use historical train operation records to estimate the influence of high-speed train disturbances (HSTD), including the number of affected trains (NAT) and total delayed time (TDT), considering the timetable and disturbance characteristics. We first extracted data about the disturbances and their affected train groups from historical train operation records of Wuhan-Guangzhou (W-G) HSR in China. Then, in order to recognize the concatenations and differences of disturbances, we used a K-Means clustering algorithm to classify them into four categories. Next, parametric and nonparametric density estimation approaches were applied to fit the distributions of NAT and TDT of each clustered category, and the goodness-of-fit testing results showed that Log-normal and Gamma distribution probability densities are the best functions to approximate the distribution of NAT and TDT of different disturbance clusters. Specifically, the validation results show that the proposed models accurately revealed the characteristics of HSTD and that these models can be used in real-time dispatch to predict the NAT and TDT, once the basic features of disturbances are known.