Adding flexibility to the timetable in real-time railway traffic management

With the strong backing and advocacy from the EU for railway transport, it is crucial to focus on innovative and efficient technologies to maintain service quality. In daily train operations, traffic uncertainties lead to perturbations, which may result in two types of track conflicts: disturbances and disruptions.<br/><br/>In the current...

Robust Shunting in a Dynamic Environment: Deriving Proactive Schedules from a Reactive Policy

When trains are not actively traveling on the main rail network, they to be parked and prepared for their next journey. This is a complex problem, involving several interconnected subproblems. Additionally, there is uncertainty in this environment which can render initial plans infeasible during their execution. To ensure trains are able to...

Inferring Robust Plans with a Rail Network Simulator

Over 700 trains in the Netherlands are used daily for passenger transportation. Train operations involve tasks like parking, recombination, cleaning, and maintenance, which take place in shunting yards. The train unit shunting problem (TUSP) is a complex planning problem made more difficult by uncertainties such as delays. Most existing...

Develop a demand-oriented train service plan by using the railway passenger demand pattern

To develop a demand-oriented train service plan, the railway passenger demand characteristics are needed to be analyzed first. The analysis mainly starts with the volume and structure of the demand, and based on these characteristics, periods that have similar characteristics are classified into the same pattern. Thus a period of time, for...

Hourly Traffic Density Based Decomposition in Non-Centralised Railway Traffic Management

The Dutch railway network is a dense network with 7000 kilometers of railway tracks spread over only 42 000 square kilometers [1, 2]. Additionally, the railways are responsible for 1.4 million passengers every working day [1]. These factors make both the infrastructure and timetable of the Dutch railway network extremely intricate. On top of...

Multi-modal System Design for Urban Metro Systems to Handle Excessive Demand Caused by Mega-events: Master of Science in Transport, Infrastructure and Logistics

Due to the continuous expansion of the urban scale, the urban metro transportation system also needs to be constantly updated, especially those cities that need to carry mega-events. Larger carrying capacity, better collaboration mode and more optimized operation mode are required to handle the sudden increase in travel demand. The ever-growing...

System reliability analysis of interactions between ETCS, train drivers and dispatchers, demonstrated by STPA

The Dutch railway transport system is a system of systems and also a sociotechnical system that will migrate to a radio-based signalling standard ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System). ERTMS will influence the train drivers and dispatchers the most, especially due to the introduction of the signalling and control element of ERTMS: the...

A heuristic method for the distribution of freight wagons on a rail yard taking into account dangerous goods

A heuristic method for the operation of shunting yards is created that considers the sorting process of wagons with dangerous goods. This concerns shunting yards where the wagons are distributed manually, and communication takes place by telephone. The first problem is that an entire train is considered dangerous if there is a wagon with...

Multi machine approaches for conflict resolution under moving block signalling

Railway networks are to play an increasingly large role in European transportation. This has boosted the urgency of railway innovations, of which the development of decision support systems for conflict resolution is an important aspect. This research contributes to this development by formulating a suitable mathematical approach for railway...

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...

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...

Estimating the capacity of a stabling yard with the implementation of 100% servicing

In this study an analytical model is created that estimates the capacity of a stabling yard with the implementation of 100% servicing. 100% servicing is a new concept developed by NS to increase the quality of trains by increasing the frequency of cleaning and maintenance of trains and improving planning of shunting movements at stabling yards...

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...