Rescheduling trains with scenario-based fuzzy recovery time representation on two-way double-track railways

Abstract

Severe weather conditions and inherent uncertainties in various components of railway traffic systems can lead to equipment breakdown and reduced capacity on tracks and stations. This paper formulates a two-stage fuzzy optimization model to obtain a robust rescheduling plan under irregular traffic conditions, and a scenario-based representation is adapted to characterize fuzzy recovery time durations on a double-track railway line. The model aims to minimize the expected total delay time in the rescheduled train schedule with respect to the original timetable. Two decomposed sub-models are further developed corresponding to the trains in different directions, and then GAMS optimization software is used to obtain the robust rescheduling plan. The numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.