Stability of railway dispatching solutions under a stochastic and dynamic environment

Stability of railway dispatching solutions under a stochastic and dynamic environment

Quaglietta, E.
Corman, F.
Goverde, R.M.P.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Transport & Planning

2013-05-13

In the last decade simulation models and optimization environments have been developed that are able to address the complexity of real-time railway dispatching. Nevertheless, actual implementations of these systems in practice are scarce. Essential for implementation of an advanced dispatching system is the trust of traffic controllers into a stable working of the system. Nervous systems might change advice suddenly, and even switch back to a solution previously discarded, as time and knowledge of the perturbation progress. To this end, we propose several metrics and a framework to assess the stability of railway dispatching solutions under incomplete knowledge, and report on the evaluation of the state-of-the-art dispatching system ROMA, coupled with the simulation environment EGTRAIN, here considered as a surrogate of the real field. Rescheduling plans calculated at different control stages have been compared for different prediction horizons of the rescheduling tool. This setup has been applied to the Dutch Utrecht-Den Bosch corridor. Results obtained from this case study show that more stable control strategies are achieved when using shorter prediction horizons. Train retiming is scarcely sensitive to changes in the prediction horizon but more affected by the dynamic propagation of random disturbances over time.

train dispatching,
stability analysis
real-time railway traffic management

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:abb5e09c-451e-4da4-aaf2-51764f8a0ea7

IAROR

978-87-7327-246-6

RailCopenhagen2013: 5th International Conference on Railway Operations Modelling and Analysis, Copenhagen, Denmark, 13-15 May 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 The Author(s)