Design of Customer-oriented Dispatching Support for Railways

Abstract

Traditionally, dispatching strategies in railways mainly concentrate on maintaining timeliness of trains and ensuring passenger connections. Although customer-orientation is getting more and more important today, little is explicitly known about the effects of various dispatching strategies into customer satisfaction. In this paper, we discuss the design of dispatching support systems for railway pas- senger traffic from the viewpoint of passenger orientation. We have implemented simulation and optimization based tools and validated them using extensive data from German Rail. We report on three systems: A coarse simulator based on global waiting time rules, a detailed agent-based simulator, and an exact optimization system. The system environment can be used offiine, and partially online as well, to test and evaluate dispatching strategies. The focus of the paper is on the system design and its validation for the purposes of railway dispatching. The numerical results are still preliminary and have to be extended in subsequent studies.