Evaluating disturbance robustness of railway dispatching measures

Railway traffic is operated according to a detailed (off-line) schedule of operations, specifying for each train its path through the network plus arrival and departure times at its scheduled stops. During daily operations disturbances perturb the plan and dispatchers take actions in order to keep operations feasible and to limit delay propagation. This paper presents a dispatching tool to handle the management of railway traffic during infrastructure disruptions in a large network. Due to its capabilities, the tool can also be used to evaluate draft timetables. This work evaluates the delay robustness of timetables that follow a “shuttle principle” to be more robust than regular timetables against wide-spread disturbances, as adverse weather and other operational disturbances. A test case is presented on a large Dutch railway network with heavy traffic, for which we compute quickly efficient train schedules at the level of block signals. When comparing the schedules, a trade-off is found between the minimization of delays, due to train conflicts and due to disturbed rolling stock and crew duties, and of the generalized travel time for passengers at given origins and destinations.