A Data-Driven Approach for Generation of Tactical Planning Rules Regarding Buffer Time in Initial Railway Timetables: A Case Study on the Differentiation of Buffer Times in the Railway Timetable of Nederlandse Spoorwegen

Despite advanced communication, monitoring, and control facilities, train operations are still subject to uncertainties that can disturb train services, cause delay to multiple trains, and propagate through the network. One option is to mitigate delay propagation in the timetable design by adding buffer time to the minimum difference between the...

A capacity-effective scheduling approach for virtual coupling train operations

As the demand for the railways is expected to raise in the future, researchers are looking for ways to improve the railway capacity to increase the transport ability. Virtual coupling is a new solution based on the moving block technology, which further shortens train separation from absolute braking distance to relative braking distance. This...

A data-driven approach for evaluating the resilience of railway networks

Disruptions occur frequently in railway networks, requiring adjustments to the timetable, rolling stock planning and crew planning while causing delays and cancellations. Although the evolu­tion of system performance during a disruption can be visualized in the resilience curve, not much is known about performance during disruptions or the...

Analysing the impacts of peak demand and traffic rescheduling in high frequency metro networks

With the increasing demand for public transport systems worldwide and also a lot of these systems running at their maximum capacity, there is a strong need for finding ways for these systems to operate in a more efficient way. In recent transportation research there is an increasing attention for operational conditions and the impact of...

Routing Optimization for the Train Unit Shunting Problem using a Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework

In busy passenger railway networks, a large amount of trains have to be parked in shunting yards off the mainline every night, where they will be cleaned, maintained, sorted and parked. This problem is known as the Train Unit Shunting Problem (TUSP), which is a hard combinatorial optimization problem faced by railway operators. The TUSP is...

Simultaneous optimization of rolling stock maintenance scheduling and rolling stock maintenance location choice

The current research addresses a problem found in the area of railway operations regarding the maintenance of rolling stock units. It focuses on the situation in The Netherlands and approaches the problem from the perspective of its main railway operator N.V. Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS).<br/>The increasing use of the capacity of the railway...

Increasing the Effectiveness of the Capacity Usage at Rolling Stock Service Locations

Passengers often complain about dirty trains indicating the relevance of interior cleaning of rolling stock (RS). Servicing tasks (i.e. interior and exterior cleaning and smaller technical checks) are executed on a daily basis at service locations (SLs). Currently, due to train operations during daytime, the current focus lies on night servicing...

Deceleration behaviour of commuter heavy rail vehicles

This MSc thesis research has the objective to empirically determine the perceived stochastic nature of the deceleration regimes and to determine the impact it has on infrastructure occupation within the network corridor. This research expands on the data-driven reconstruction model to estimate the speed profiles of realised train runs developed...

Optimizing Long-Term Planning of Railway Maintenance

Railway maintenance is currently planned according to a fixed schedule, mostly of one year. This is usually not optimal when considering the cost of maintenance, of possessions and of failure. However, an approach that minimizes the sum of these costs was not yet available. This paper presents a statistical analysis method and an optimization...

Adjusting train routing in case of planned infrastructure maintenance

In a busy railway network such as the Netherlands, more and more maintenance activities are needed to be performed. These planned activities often lead to an infeasible timetable since infrastructure is temporary unavailable for operations. A macroscopic network model can roughly adjust the timetable for a complete network, while a microscopic...