Method for designing robust and energy efficient railway schedules

Abstract

The robustness of the timetable is a sensitive issue in the daily realization of railway operations. As shown in the paper, robustness is a function of time reserves that helps to prevent unscheduled stops resulting from traffic disruptions and causing a higher energy consumption. The correct handling of time reserves while scheduling is a multidimensional issue, and it has a significant influence on the energy consumption of railway traffic. Therefore, the paper aims to show a simulation-based method, taking into account failure occurring probabilities and their consequences to get an acceptable level of robustness, that can be quantified by the probability of no delay propagation. This paper presents a method for the addition of time margins to the railway timetable. The iterative time buffer adding method is based on operational data as a knowledge source, to achieve the punctuality target. It was verified on a real railway line. An analysis of energy consumption for unscheduled train stops depending on the added buffer time was conducted after the literature review and the presentation of the evaluation model. The paper ends with discussion of the results and conclusions.