A three-level framework for performance-based railway timetabling

Abstract

The performance of railway operations depends highly on the quality of the railway timetable. In particular for dense railway networks it can be a challenge to obtain a stable robust conflict-free and energy-efficient timetable with acceptable infrastructure occupation and short travel times. This paper presents a performance-based railway timetabling framework using an integrated approach on three levels: microscopic, macroscopic and a corridor fine-tuning level, to compute a timetable explicitly driven by the above mentioned performance indicators. A case study on the Dutch railway network illustrates the feasibility of this approach to achieve the highest timetabling design level.

Review of energy-efficient train control and timetabling

“…Then the Dynamic Programming model was applied to the regional trains. Goverde et al (2016) applied this method to a Dutch railway network of several interconnected railway lines and report energy savings of 35.5% for all trains over the network with respect to the energy consumption of the minimum running times. Mills et al (1991) studied a different version of EETT.…”

Robust routing and timetabling in complex railway stations

“…Furthermore, also here, robustness is not considered. More advanced micro-macro approaches also detect places sensitive for delay propagation, for example based on an infrastructure occupation rate higher than the recommended threshold by UIC (2013) in Goverde et al, 2016;Be²inovi¢ et al, 2017). These works manage delay propagation by including or removing supplements to dwell and running times of the appropriate trains, but this can also cause new conicts.…”

“…The main dierence with our work is the infrastructure lay-out and train density for which the method is designed. Another dierence is that Be²inovi¢ et al (2016); Goverde et al (2016) use heuristic approaches, while we make use of exact optimization models. The advantage is that with our approach the routing plan and the timetable can be optimally designed for the bottleneck.…”

Microscopic Models and Network Transformations for Automated Railway Traffic Planning

“…The ON‐TIME project defined a framework for achieving high‐quality railway timetables with an integrated set of state‐of‐the‐art timetabling techniques. More details about the models used and the framework developed can be found in (Goverde et al., ). One of the main objectives of the project was to build up “a scheduled train‐path assignment application, with automatic conflict detection capabilities, that builds on the concept of robust timetables, has a unified network coverage, is microscopic at selected parts of the control area, is scalable, and able to connect to Traffic Management Systems, with user‐friendly interfaces and execution states that correspond to the IM timetabling management milestones.” This objective has been reached by the two‐level functional framework represented in Figure , which indicates the interactions among the microscopic and macroscopic models.…”

“…To overcome the limitations in the state‐of‐the‐art and answer the questions from practice, we developed a hierarchical framework of performance‐based railway timetable design in the European FP7 project ON‐TIME (Optimal Networks for Train Integration Management across Europe) (Goverde et al., ). In particular, the framework includes microscopic models presented in this article and a macroscopic timetabling model that interact iteratively by adapting microscopic running and minimum headway times until the produced macroscopic timetable is proved feasible and stable.…”