Fast Approaches to Improve the Robustness of a Railway Timetable

Fischetti, Matteo; Salvagnin, Domenico; Zanette, Arrigo

doi:10.1287/trsc.1090.0264

Cited by 136 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Fischetti et al [12] propose a light robustness approach to take robustness of a solution into account and at the same time maintain low computational times. On a medium sized network, the proposed approach results in two order of magnitude improvements for CPU time while maintaining almost the same solution quality.…”

Section: Literature On Robust Railway Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Susceptibility of optimal train schedules to stochastic disturbances of process times

et al. 2013

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This work focuses on the stochastic evaluation of train schedules computed by a microscopic scheduler of railway operations based on deterministic information. The research question is to assess the degree of sensitivity of various scheduling algorithms to variations in process times (running and dwell times). In fact, the objective of railway traffic management is to reduce delay propagation and to increase disturbance robustness of train schedules at a network scale. We present a quantitative study of traffic disturbances and their effects on the schedules computed by simple and advanced scheduling algorithms. Computational results are based on a complex and densely occupied Dutch railway area; train delays are computed based on accepted statistical distributions, and dwell and running times of trains are subject to additional stochastic variations. From the results obtained on a real case study, an advanced branch and bound algorithm, on average, outperforms a First In First Out scheduling rule both in deterministic and stochastic traffic scenarios. However, the characteristic of the stochastic processes and the way a stochastic instance is handled turn out to have a serious impact on the scheduler performance.

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Section: Literature On Robust Railway Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Susceptibility of optimal train schedules to stochastic disturbances of process times

et al. 2013

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“…First, we remark that there exists a wide literature on capacity allocation issues in railway. For example, several models proposed in the literature aim to solving the scheduling problem focusing on a certain objective function under predefined constraints to optimality, such as periodic time windows constraints [5], or introduce stochastic disturbances [6]; Fischetti et al [7] focused on robustness improvement of a given solution; Ho et al [8], after remarking that multi-objective optimization approaches often end with feasible solutions because of the constraints on computation time, propose a method for designing the scheduling based on Particle Swarm Optimization that considers the negotiations rounds among the IM and the TOs. Another interesting field is that of simulation tools, possibly combined with other instruments and approaches.…”

Section: Previous Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A game theoretic model for re-optimizing a railway timetable

Fragnelli

Sanguineti²

2013

Eur. Transp. Res. Rev.

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The Setting In the Nineties of the last century the European Commission decided to open the railway market to competition, allowing different railway companies to operate on the same network. Under this framework Infrastructure Managers have to allocate capacity in order to define the timetable, dealing with possible slot conflicts between competing Transport Operators. The Problem An efficient train scheduling requires collecting a lot of information from the Transport Operators, but it may not be in their interests to reveal their private information. Therefore, it may be useful for real-world applications to design methods that provide incentives to Transport Operators for cooperating with the aim of increasing their utility; moreover, this may result in an improvement of the efficiency even for the Infrastructure Managers, so they also have incentives for favouring the cooperation. The Proposal In this paper we propose a game theoretical model in which the agents (Transport Operators) exchange information on their needs and are compensated by a possible increasing of their utility. This approach represents the situation as a coalition formation problem. In particular, we refer to the C-Solution proposed by Gerber (Rev Econ Design 5:149-175, 1), which is applied to some examples, each with different features. This model requires that information is revealed to a small number of competitors. This is rather important in a market currently still characterized by operator reluctance to an indiscriminate diffusion of information. Furthermore, the low dimension of the problem allows having a low computational complexity.

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“…Generally, it is presented in the form of average delay (Khan and Zhou [11], Fischetti et al [9], Kroon et al [14], and Vromans et al [20]), secondary and total delay (Larsen et al [15]), punctuality (Andersson et al [3]), and the number of affected passengers (Dewilde et al [8]). However, the importance of the ex-ante measures cannot be denied because the traffic performance is based on the design quality of the timetable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, Schöbel and Kratz [19] and Cicerone et al [5] proposed the price of robustness to calculate the effect of the increased margins, which was defined as the ratio between the cost of the robust timetable and the optimal timetable without robustness. Kroon et al [12] and Fischetti et al [9] proposed weighted average distance (WAD) to find the distributions of runtime margins for a particular train. Carey [4] and Kroon et al [13] Percentage of headways equal to or less than the minimum value (PoH) Runtime Salido et al [17,18] and De Fabris et al [6] Total amount of runtime margin for each individual train (TAoRM)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ex-ante robustness measures for single track train timetables

2017

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Preliminary communicationThe goal of the paper is to propose a measurement to quantify and improve the robustness of the train timetables at the design stage. The paper presents the modeling and application of an ex-ante robustness measure for single track railways, known as the Critical Robustness Measure (CRM). Efficiency of the CRM is demonstrated by comparing the technique with the available ex-ante robustness measures, e.g., the number of trains per hour per section, the total amount of runtime margin for each individual train, sum of shortest headway reciprocals, weighted average distance, marginal runtime difference, robustness at the critical points, and margins along the longest path. Numerical experiment sare conducted on a hypothetical example and a selected single track segment of the Pakistan Railways. Computational results reveal that it is not useful to add the time margins to all activites (e.g., running times, headways) in the timetable because not all components of margins are effective for the robustness of a timetable. Furthermore, the robustness is not statically quantifiable, since it may change with time and be associated with the way of the train's interactions. Keywords: critical points; ex-ante measures; robustness measurement; train timetableEx-ante mjere dugotrajnosti za vozne redove jednokolosiječne željezničke pruge Prethodno priopećenje Cilj je ovoga rada predložiti mjerenje u svrhu kvantificiranja i poboljšanja dugotrajnosti voznih redova već kod izrade. U radu se predstavlja modeliranje i primjena ex-ante mjere dugotrajnosti za vozne jednokolosiječne željezničke pruge, poznate kao Critical Robustness Measure (CRM). Učinkovitost te mjere demonstrira se usporedbom te metode s dostupnim ex-ante mjerama izdržljivosti, tj. brojem vlakova po satu po dionici, ukupnim iznosom granice vremena vožnje za svaki pojedinačni vlak, zbirom najkraćih uzajamnih vemenskih intervala između dva vlaka, ponderiranim prosjekom udaljenosti, marginalnom razlikom u vremenu vožnje, izdržljivosti u kritičnim točkama, i granicama vremena vožnje na najdužoj stazi. Numerički eksperimenti provedeni su na hipotetičkom primjeru i izabranom dijelu jednokolosiječne pruge na pakistanskim željeznicama. Rezultati proračuna pokazuju da nije korisno dodati vremenska ograničenja kod svih aktivnosti (na pr. vrijeme vožnje, vremenski razmak između dva vlaka) u voznom redu jer nisu sve komponente uključene u granicu vremena vožnje korisne za dugotrajnost nekog voznog reda. Nadalje, ta se dugotrajnost ne može statistički kvantificirati budući da se tijekom vremena može promijeniti i povezati s načinom interakcija između vlakova. Ključne riječi: ex-ante mjere; kritične točke; mjerenje dugotrajnosti (izdržljivosti); vozni red vlaka

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Fast Approaches to Improve the Robustness of a Railway Timetable

Cited by 136 publications

References 12 publications

Susceptibility of optimal train schedules to stochastic disturbances of process times

Susceptibility of optimal train schedules to stochastic disturbances of process times

A game theoretic model for re-optimizing a railway timetable

Ex-ante robustness measures for single track train timetables

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