Closing the loop in real-time railway control: Framework design and impacts on operations

摘要

Railway traffic is heavily affected by disturbances and/or disruptions, which are often cause of delays and low performance of train services. The impact and the propagation of such delays can be mitigated by relying on automatic tools for rescheduling traffic in real-time. These tools predict future track conflict based on current train information and provide suitable control measures (e.g. reordering, retiming and/or rerouting) by using advanced mathematical models. A growing literature is available on these tools, but their effects on real operations are blurry and not yet well known, due to the very scarce implementation of such systems in practice.