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This paper proposes an iterative approach to construct a passenger robust railway routing plan and timetable from scratch that also takes supplement and buffer time allocation into account on the signaling level. Each iteration is based on four pillars, which are subsequently executed. First a routing plan that optimizes infrastructure usage is constructed. Secondly, a timetable is constructed that optimizes buffer times between trains while taking passenger numbers into account. Thirdly, simulation is used to evaluate the passenger robustness of the routing plan and the timetable. Finally, the simulation outcome is used to make a new supplement assignment for the next iteration. The algorithm is tested on a case study for the complex station area of Brussels (Belgium). The resulting timetable and routing plan are much more passenger robust than the existing combinations of timetables and routing plans for this case, developed during research or implemented in practice. no ISSN ispartof: pages:190-208 ispartof: Proceedings of 7th International Seminar on Railway Operations Modelling and Analysis (IAROR) vol:2017 pages:190-208 ispartof: RailLille2017 location:Lille, France date:4 Apr - 7 Apr 2017 status: published

In nearly saturated station areas the limited capacity is one of the main reasons of delay propagation. Spreading the trains well in time and space in these areas has a big impact on the passenger robustness, i.e. the total travel time in practice of all passengers in the railway network in case of frequently occurring small delays. We focus on improving the performance in the bottleneck of the network in order to improve the performance of the whole railway network. This paper proposes a method that builds from scratch a routing plan and a cyclic timetable that optimizes the infrastructure occupation and the passenger robustness. An integer linear routing model assigns, without considering a timetable, every train to a route such that the maximal node usage is minimized and that the number of times that each node is used, is quadratically penalized. Thereafter, a mixed integer linear timetabling model assigns to each train the blocking times at which the nodes on its route, assigned by the routing model, are reserved and released. Different from other approaches is that we focus on the occupation of the railway infrastructure before constructing the timetable. The approach is validated on the complex railway station area of Brussels (Belgium). Our routing plan and timetable from scratch improve the passenger robustness up to 11% compared to a reference timetable and routing plan composed by the Belgian railway infrastructure manager Infrabel and by up to 2% compared to a reference timetable and routing plan from literature. ispartof: Transportation Research Part B vol:101 pages:228-244 status: published

We propose a heuristic algorithm to build a railway line plan from scratch that minimizes passenger travel time and operator cost and for which a feasible and robust timetable exists. A line planning module and a timetabling module work iteratively and interactively. The line planning module creates an initial line plan. The timetabling module evaluates the line plan and identifies a critical line based on minimum buffer times between train pairs. The line planning module proposes a new line plan in which the time length of the critical line is modified in order to provide more flexibility in the schedule. This flexibility is used during timetabling to improve the robustness of the railway system. The algorithm is validated on the DSB S-tog network of Copenhagen, which is a high frequency railway system, where overtakings are not allowed. This network has a rather simple structure, but is constrained by limited shunt capacity. While the operator and passenger cost remain close to those of the initially and (for these costs) optimally built line plan, the timetable corresponding to the finally developed robust line plan significantly improves the minimum buffer time, and thus the robustness, in eight out of ten studied cases. publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Integrating robust timetabling in line plan optimization for railway systems journaltitle: Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2017.01.015 content_type: article copyright: © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ispartof: Transportation Research C, Emerging Technologies vol:77 pages:134-160 status: published

Planned infrastructure works reduce the available capacity of a railway system and make it more vulnerable to conflicts and delay propagation. The starting point of this paper is a published timetable that needs to be adapted due to the temporary unavailability of some resources. Since the timetable is in operation, changed arrival or departure times and cancelations have an impact on the passengers who need to adapt their travel behavior. In the light of passenger service, a trade-off is made between these inconveniences and the delays that occur in practice due to the reduced capacity. Taking the robustness of the adapted railway timetable into account is a new approach to rescheduling in case of a planned infrastructure unavailability. In this paper, an algorithm that adjusts the train routing and the train schedule to the planned maintenance interventions and keeps the level of passenger service as high as possible is presented. To avoid large inconveniences, the developed algorithm tries to minimize the number of cancelations. Computational results show that by allowing small modifications to the routing and the timetable, the robustness of the resulting solution can improve by more than 10 percent and only few trains need to be canceled. publisher: Elsevier articletitle: An iterative approach for reducing the impact of infrastructure maintenance on the performance of railway systems journaltitle: European Journal of Operational Research articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2015.12.037 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ispartof: European Journal of Operational Research vol:252 issue:1 pages:39-53 status: published