Railway timetable rescheduling for multiple simultaneous disruptions

Abstract

Unexpected disruptions occur in the railways on a daily basis, which are typically handled manually by experienced traffic controllers with the support of predefined contingency plans. When several disruptions occur simultaneously, it is rather hard for traffic controllers to make traffic management decisions, because 1) the predefined contingency plans corresponding to these disruptions may conflict with each other and 2) no predefined contingency plan considering the combined effects of all disruptions is available. This paper proposes a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model that reschedules the timetable automatically in case of multiple simultaneous disruptions occurring at different geographic locations. This multiple-disruptions rescheduling model considers the interactions be- tween service adjustments made for different disruptions. The combined multiple- disruptions rescheduling model is applied every time an extra disruption occurs by considering all ongoing disruptions. Also, a sequential single-disruption rescheduling model is considered to handle each new disruption with the last solution as reference. A case study is performed by assuming two simultaneous disruptions occurring in part of the Dutch railways with 38 stations and 10 train lines operating half-hourly in each direction. By setting 3 minutes as the computation time limit in the considered disruption scenario, the combined approach resulted in less cancelled train services and train delays compared to the sequential approach.