Railway disruption recovery: lessons from airlines

Abstract

CTI is combining its products for situation awareness and disruption recovery in airlines with its railway timetabling software to develop a tool for situation awareness and disruption recovery in a railway environment.Analysis has shown that many concepts are similar, but that the extra complications caused by interactions between train paths require extra visualisation options such as train diagrams and spatial network displays, along with extra constraint checking to identify and prevent conflicts.It has been found that these extra requirements can fit within the same overall framework as is used for airlines. The extra visualisation options for rail were then seen to in turn provide value for airlines, as the format used for train diagrams is useful to visualise crew connections, and spatial network displays are useful to visualise air corridors. The extra constraint checking required for rail can also be useful for airlines to model flow restrictions placed on congested runways and air corridors.