An efficient heuristic for train rescheduling and local rerouting

Abstract

Though timetabling can account for some possible delays, in practice, external events still regularly lead to delays. Once trains are deviating from their schedule, conflicts can occur. A conflict implies that (at least) two trains require the same part of the infrastructure at the same time. Conflicts need to be resolved quickly in a way that disturbs the system as little as possible. Therefore, the impact on the whole network should be taken into account when solving conflicts. This paper discusses a heuristic conflict prevention technique capable of solving multiple conflicts together by reordering, retiming and locally rerouting trains. Based on a close-to-practice simulation tool where a simplified prediction horizon up to 10 minutes is considered, this technique is compared to FCFS. Results show significant improvements when comparing to FCFS.