Title: Traffic disruptions: a dynamic heuristic approach

Authors: Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Addresses: Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

Abstract: A heuristic solution to rescheduling railway traffic, when an already planned schedule cannot be adhered to because of disruptions is presented in this paper. A mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation is developed to model disruptions that lead to conflicts on a single track bi-directional scheduled traffic with over-taking and follow-up capacities. The proposed objective is to minimise the total delay of all trains in the operational domain at their respective destinations. We have developed a rescheduling heuristic that re-sequences the conflict trains using a look-ahead-based dynamic ranking (LADR) approach. LADR procedure ranks the conflict trains on their static priority, myopic delay, critical ratio, number of future conflicts and total future delay. The heuristic procedure takes as input a conflict free schedule and is action-initiated by any disrupt to this schedule. The conflicting trains are identified and on the basis of their sorted LADRs departure times are assigned. Each conflicting train is rescheduled one at a time till all trains are rescheduled to their destinations. Our results are promising when evaluated against three other known procedures on a medium-sized real world data.

Keywords: railway rescheduling; conflicts; mixed integer programming; ranking heuristics; single track railways; bi-directional trains; scheduled traffic; traffic disruptions; railway traffic; modelling; train delays; departure times; scheduling conflicts; train rescheduling; train disruption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2016.073296

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2016 Vol.23 No.1, pp.25 - 52

Received: 10 Sep 2014
Accepted: 20 Sep 2014
Published online: 30 Nov 2015 *

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