Delay Resistant Timetabling

The goal of this work is to support a management decision on how much prolongation of travel time one is willing to pay for delay resistance, and to ensure, that for a certain budget of buffer time the maximum resistance against delays is achieved

Phase Synchronization in Railway Timetables

Timetable construction belongs to the most important optimization problems in public transport. Finding optimal or near-optimal timetables under the subsidiary conditions of minimizing travel times and other criteria is a targeted contribution to the functioning of public transport. In addition to efficiency (given, e.g., by minimal average travel times), a significant feature of a timetable is its robustness against delay propagation. Here we study the balance of efficiency and robustness in long-distance railway timetables (in particular the current long-distance railway timetable in Germany) from the perspective of synchronization, exploiting the fact that a major part of the trains run nearly periodically. We find that synchronization is highest at intermediate-sized stations. We argue that this synchronization perspective opens a new avenue towards an understanding of railway timetables by representing them as spatio-temporal phase patterns. Robustness and efficiency can then be viewed as properties of this phase pattern

On the delivery robustness of train timetables with respect to production replanning possibilities

Measuring timetable robustness is a complex task. Previous efforts have mainly been focused on simulation studies or measurements of time supplements. However, these measurements don't capture the production flexibility of a timetable, which is essential for measuring the robustness with regard to the trains' commercial activity commitments, and also for merging the goals of robustness and efficiency. In this article we differentiate between production timetables and delivery timetables. A production timetable contains all stops, meetings and switch crossings, while a delivery timetable only contains stops for commercial activities. If a production timetable is constructed such that it can easily be replanned to cope with delays without breaking any commercial activity commitments it provides delivery robustness without compromising travel efficiency. Changing meeting locations is one of the replanning tools available during operation, and this paper presents a new framework for heuristically optimising a given production timetable with regard to the number of alternative meeting locations. Mixed integer programming is used to find two delivery feasible production solutions, one early and one late. The area between the two solutions represents alternative meeting locations and therefore also the replanning enabled robustness. A case study from Sweden demonstrates how the method can be used to develop better production timetables

An Overview and Categorization of Approaches for Train Timetable Generation

A train timetable is a crucial component of railway transportation systems as it directly impacts the system’s performance and the customer satisfaction. Various approaches can be found in the literature that deal with timetable generation. However, the approaches proposed in the literature differ significantly in terms of the use case for which they are in tended. Differences in objective function, timetable periodicity, and solution methods have led to a confusing number of works on this topic. Therefore, this paper presents a com pact literature review of approaches to train timetable generation. The reviewed papers are briefly summarized and categorized by objective function and periodicity. Special emphasis is given to approaches that have been applied to real-world railway data

Robustness as a Third Dimension for Evaluating Public Transport Plans

Providing attractive and efficient public transport services is of crucial importance due to higher demands for mobility and the need to reduce air pollution and to save energy. The classical planning process in public transport tries to achieve a reasonable compromise between service quality for passengers and operating costs. Service quality mostly considers quantities like average travel time and number of transfers. Since daily public transport inevitably suffers from delays caused by random disturbances and disruptions, robustness also plays a crucial role. While there are recent attempts to achieve delay-resistant timetables, comparably little work has been done to systematically assess and to compare the robustness of transport plans from a passenger point of view. We here provide a general and flexible framework for evaluating public transport plans (lines, timetables, and vehicle schedules) in various ways. It enables planners to explore several trade-offs between operating costs, service quality (average perceived travel time of passengers), and robustness against delays. For such an assessment we develop several passenger-oriented robustness tests which can be instantiated with parameterized delay scenarios. Important features of our framework include detailed passenger flow models, delay propagation schemes and disposition strategies, rerouting strategies as well as vehicle capacities. To demonstrate possible use cases, our framework has been applied to a variety of public transport plans which have been created for the same given demand for an artificial urban grid network and to instances for long-distance train networks. As one application we study the impact of different strategies to improve the robustness of timetables by insertion of supplement times. We also show that the framework can be used to optimize waiting strategies in delay management

Solving the Periodic Scheduling Problem: An Assignment Approach in Non-Periodic Networks

The periodic event scheduling problem (PESP) is a well researched problem used for finding good periodic timetables in public transport. While it is based on a periodic network consisting of events and activities which are repeated every period, we propose a new periodic timetabling model using a non-periodic network. This is a first step towards the goal of integrating periodic timetabling with other planning steps taking place in the aperiodic network, e.g. passenger assignment or delay management. In this paper, we develop the new model, show how we can reduce its size and prove its equivalence to PESP. We also conduct computational experiments on close-to real-world data from Lower Saxony, a region in northern Germany, and see that the model can be solved in a reasonable amount of time

Dynamic Algorithms for Recoverable Robustness Problems

Recently, the recoverable robustness model has been introduced in the optimization area. This model allows to consider disruptions (input data changes) in a unified way, that is, during both the strategic planning phase and the operational phase. Although the model represents a significant improvement, it has the following drawback: we are typically not facing only one disruption, but many of them might appear one after another. In this case, the solutions provided in the context of the recoverable robustness are not satisfying. In this paper we extend the concept of recoverable robustness to deal not only with one single recovery step, but with arbitrarily many recovery steps. To this aim, we introduce the notion of dynamic recoverable robustness problems. We apply the new model in the context of timetabling and delay management problems. We are interested in finding efficient dynamic robust algorithms for solving the timetabling problem and in evaluating the price of robustness of the proposed solutions