Timing of Train Disposition: Towards Early Passenger Rerouting in Case of Delays

Passenger-friendly train disposition is a challenging, highly complex online optimization problem with uncertain and incomplete information about future delays. In this paper we focus on the timing within the disposition process. We introduce three different classification schemes to predict as early as possible the status of a transfer: whether it will almost surely break, is so critically delayed that it requires manual disposition, or can be regarded as only slightly uncertain or as being safe. The three approaches use lower bounds on travel times, historical distributions of delay data, and fuzzy logic, respectively. In experiments with real delay data we achieve an excellent classification rate. Furthermore, using realistic passenger flows we observe that there is a significant potential to reduce the passenger delay if an early rerouting strategy is applied. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems; G.2.2 Graph Theory (Graph algorithms; Network problems)