Robust Train Timetabling

Nowadays railway systems are highly affected by disturbances, occurring in daily operations, and causing train delays and passenger inconvenience. Not only they negatively affect the passengers satisfaction, but they also cause additional operational costs, since the planned schedule needs to be modified in real-time. Train timetabling is a particularly critical phase in railway system management, since, in real-time operations, all the changes applied to the planned timetable impact on platform assignment, rolling stock circulation and crew scheduling. Therefore, in the strategic planning, it is an important issue to determine robust timetables, i.e., timetables that “perform well” under disturbances, avoiding delay propagation as much as possible. In this chapter, we present state-of-the-art methods that achieve robust timetables, and discuss their advantages and drawbacks.