Conference article

This paper focuses on the real-time train platforming and routing problem at a busy complex high-speed railway station in a disrupted situation caused by malfunctioning railway infrastructure or train primary delay. When the disruption occurs, dispatchers need to reassign trains to the conflict-free platform and route, even reschedule the arrival and departure times. To this end, we develop a mixed-integer linear programming formulation that determines platforming and routing decision simultaneously, while allowing trains to be rescheduled when the initial schedule imposes irreconcilable conflicts. The objective of our model is to minimize the overall deviation from the planned schedule and the original platforming plans. To improve the solving efficiency, an iterative algorithm is proposed to compute near-optimal solutions in a short computation time, which is based on the decomposition of the overall problem into two sub-problems: (i) platform and route assignment with fixed arrival and departure times, (ii) partial conflict trains rescheduling. The connecting information between two sub-problems concerns the index of conflict trains and the new train timetable. To solve sub-problem (i) efficiently, we develop a branch and bound algorithm which includes implicational rules enabling to speed up the computation and still can acquire optimal solutions. Since the model of sub-problem (ii) is the same as the model of original problem with a relative small scale, it can be solved by CPLEX solver efficiently. A real-world instance with operation data of Zhengzhou East high-speed railway station, is implemented to demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Train platforming and routing problem, Real-time conflict resolution, Linear programming, Branch and bound algorithm