Maximizing Railway Punctuality by Combined Simulation and Timetable Optimization

• Punctuality of railway traffic is one of the most important quality indicators for passenger traffic. In previous research it has been shown that the timetable has substantial impact on punctuality. Despite this, surprisingly few scientific approaches for explicitly maximizing the punctuality exists in the literature. The only two methods with this purpose, that we are aware of, also seems to be too computationally expensive to be applicable in practice. In this paper, we therefore propose a combined simulation-optimization method for improving the punctuality of a given main line timetable. The intended use case for this method is in tactical timetabling, for improving daily graphs in the annual timetabling process through small adjustments of the time supplements in the timetable. Throughout Europe and the world, this step is commonly done based on ad-hoc simulations or experience only. We evaluated the proposed method in a simulation experiment on the Swedish Western Main Line and compared its impact on punctuality and robustness with five other methods---three state-of-the-art methods and two more basic approaches. The most important result from the simulation experiment was that in terms of total punctuality, the proposed method was better than all other methods, and significantly so except in one case. Scalability was evaluated by solving a scenario with 10 replications of the original timetable within a little more than 2 hours, on average.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik -- Transportteknik och logistik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering -- Transport Systems and Logistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Timetabling

Train scheduling

Railroad

Robustness.

Transportvetenskap

Transport Science

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

ovr (ämneskategori)