Robust Train Routing and Online Re-scheduling

Train Routing is a problem that arises in the early phase of the passenger railway planning process, usually several months before operating the trains. The main goal is to assign each train a stopping platform and the corresponding arrival/departure paths through a railway station. It is also called Train Platforming when referring to the platform assignment task. Railway stations often represent bottlenecks and train delays can easily disrupt the routing schedule. Thereby railway stations are responsible for a large part of the delay propagation in the whole network. In this research we present different models to compute robust routing schedules and we study their power in an online context together with different re-scheduling strategies. We also design a simulation framework and use it to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the proposed robust models and re-scheduling algorithms using real-world data from Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, the main Italian Railway Infrastructure Manager.