Abstract
Routing trains through busy railway station layouts is an important part of the timetabling process. For each train, a feasible route has to be determined to provide reliable operations, given the arrival and departure times at stations. In this paper, we propose a model for stable and robust train routing with the goal to minimize capacity occupation and maximize robustness. We define a multi-objective optimization problem and provide the heuristic RouteCare based on a max-plus automata model and a delay propagation model. We consider microscopic infrastructure to guarantee practical feasibility. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated on real-life instances of the Dutch railway network. The generated solutions outperformed the variants of RouteCare that independently maximize stability or robustness by 10.4% and 9.5%, respectively. In addition, RouteCare showed that even for the same number of resources used, a more robust route plan can be found that uses the station capacity more efficiently.
Highlights
Timetable planning becomes more challenging with increasing demands and needs more attention and more effort from traffic planners
We introduce an extension to the original TRP and define it as the robust train routing problem (RTRP)
We propose a new microscopic multi-objective approach for the RTRP to improve train routing and platform assignment, which incorporates the important aspects of feasibility, stability, robustness, and balanced infrastructure occupation
Summary
Timetable planning becomes more challenging with increasing demands and needs more attention and more effort from traffic planners. Given a microscopic infrastructure and signalling system, macroscopic timetable (arrival and departure times), a set of alternative routes and train dynamics characteristics, determine a route plan including platform assignment that provides conflict-free, stable and robust operations with minimized and evenly distributed infrastructure use. Other than the time-event graph max-plus algebra models (Heidergott et al 2005; Goverde 2007), in the max-plus automata, both the start and end time of blocking each resource by each train are taken into account In this way, conflicts between trains are naturally forbidden, and this enables to compute capacity occupation by a given route plan. A blocking time stairway of a train route is computed for a given train-dynamic speed profile based on the scheduled running time on the (macroscopic) network level For this purpose, we use the microscopic timetabling models developed in Bešinović et al (2017).
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