Conference article

Due to high demand and high capacity consumption, railway timetables often become sensitive for disturbances and there is little time in the timetables for delay recovery. To maintain a high quality in railway traffic it is important that the timetables are robust and there is a need for strategies and rules for how to make them robust without consuming too much capacity. In this paper we present how timetable rules can be implemented to create more robust timetables. The rules are separated into two categories, rules to make the timetable feasible and rules to increase the delay resistance and recovery. The implementation is illustrated in a real-world case from when the timetable for the Swedish Southern mainline was created for 2019. In the paper we describe how new rules can be applied manually and we discuss advantages and disadvantages by using this approach. We also describe how the rules effect the trains, their timetable slots and runtimes. The results from this study show some of the difficulties when moving from theory to practice and what can be done with limited resources in reality. It gives insights to the practical approach of train timetabling problem which can be used to improve optimization models.

Railway timetabling, Robustness, Timetable rules, Implementation, Case study