Train rescheduling with the consideration of re-servicing during a severe disruption

Abstract

Abstract Train dispatching is critical for the punctuality and reliability of passenger transportation, especially in railway systems with ticketing reservations required. In such a system, e.g., the high-speed railway in China, the service frequency is usually low on most lines, and passengers often have very limited route options (no diversity and flexibility). In the presence of disruptions, e.g., segment blockage, trains services may be canceled due to insufficient infrastructure capacity, which can cause big troubles to passengers since they are very unlikely to find alternative, consequently being stranded. Thus, transporting these stranded passengers becomes the most important but complicated task. In this study, we propose to add extra stops to the running trains, i.e., re-servicing, in order to effectively utilize the reduced capacity of tracks. We identify and formulate the complex relation between track utilization, trains stop adding, and passenger rerouting, based on a time-space network. Local rerouting of trains is represented, and the tracks in each station are categorized by main track (stopping with no passenger activities) and siding track (train passing without a stop is not allowed). An integer linear programming (ILP) model is constructed to solve the integrated problem of train rescheduling and passenger rerouting with the consideration of re-servicing, which includes train cancelation and extra stop adding. Finally, a Lagrangian solution framework is introduced to solve the NP-hard problem, and the method is test on a real-world network of Chinese high-speed railway, conducting several experiments to demonstrate the reasonability, effectiveness, and efficiency of the proposed method.