Passenger-oriented railway disposition timetables in case of severe disruptions

Delays are one of the major reasons for passenger dissatisfaction in the railway industry. Depending on the gravity of the delay, timetables, crew schedules or rolling stock may be affected. In this research, we address the issue of timetable recovery in case of severe disruptions. Once an initial delay has occurred, the original timetable needs to be updated to a so-called disposition timetable. This new timetable has to be conflict-free in terms of operational constraints (e.g., trains cannot use the same track section at the same time) and as convenient as possible for the passengers. The recent scientific literature on recovery models mainly focuses on the operational point of view, thus paying less attention to the impact of passenger dissatisfaction in case of disruptions. This observation is the motivation for introducing a hybrid methodology that takes the satisfaction of both parties (i.e., passengers and railway companies) into account. Passengers’ travel choices are represented by means of a passenger assignment model that uses a path disutility function encompassing travel time, departure time shift and number of connections for every possible path between origin and destination. An adaptive large neighbourhood search meta-heuristic is implemented in order to generate operationally feasible disposition timetables. Its objective is to minimize the overall passenger disutility as well as operational costs. The flexibility of our framework allows to evaluate several recovery strategies (e.g., partial train cancellation, complete train cancellation, train addition, train replacement, capacity addition). This model will assist train operating companies when evaluating the trade-off between economic and infrastructural feasibility of recovery schemes on the one hand side and passenger satisfaction on the other.