Robust Train Routing and Online Re-scheduling

Abstract

Train Routing is a problem that arises in the early phase of
the passenger railway planning process, usually several months
before operating the trains.  The main goal is to assign each
train a stopping platform and the corresponding arrival/departure
paths through a railway station. It is also called Train Platforming when
referring to the platform assignment task. Railway stations often represent
bottlenecks and train delays can easily disrupt the routing schedule.
Thereby railway stations are responsible for a large part of the delay
propagation in the whole network. In this research we present
different models to compute robust routing schedules and we study
their power in an online context together with different re-scheduling
strategies. We also design a simulation framework and use it to evaluate
and compare the effectiveness of the proposed robust models and re-scheduling
algorithms using real-world data from Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, the main
Italian Railway Infrastructure Manager.