Evaluating Disturbance Robustness of Railway Schedules

Railway traffic is operated according to a detailed schedule, specifying for each train its path through the network plus arrival and departure times at its scheduled stops. During daily operations, disturbances perturb the plan and dispatchers take action in order to keep operations feasible and to limit delay propagation. This article presents a thorough assessment of the possible application of an optimization-based framework for the evaluation of different timetables and proactive railway traffic management over a large network, considering stochastic disturbances. Two types of timetables are evaluated in detail: “ regular” and “ shuttle” timetables. The former is the regular plan of operations for normal traffic conditions, while the latter plan is designed to be robust against widespread disturbances, such as adverse weather, track blockage, and other operational failures. A test case is presented on a large Dutch railway network with heavy traffic, for which we compute by microsimulation detailed train movements at the level of block signals and at a precision of seconds. When comparing the timetables, a trade-off is found between the minimization of train delays, due to potential conflicts and due to delayed rolling stock and crew duties, and the minimization of passenger travel time between given origins and destinations.