Conference article

In railway traffic management problems, a frequent approximation is the one of fixed-speed, i.e. the trains either run at their cruise speed or are stopped immediately without considering the acceleration and deceleration phases due to arising conflicts on the infrastructure. We assess the validity of the fixed-speed approximation for train speed dynamics in the real time Railway Traffic Management Problem. This is done through a statistical analysis on a number of perturbed scenarios on different railway infrastructures, for different objective functions commonly used in the literature. For each scenario, we analyze the ranking of the generated solutions both in the fixed-speed approximation, obtained by solving the optimization model, and with the variable-speed dynamics, obtained through micro simulation with the OpenTrack software. Our results indicate that some objective functions can be considered reliable when used in conjunction with the fixed-speed approximation, while others require more detailed studies. We also propose a modi?ed fixed-speed approximation to better reflect the behaviour of trains speed dynamics and study its efficiency.

Traffic Management, speed profile, fixed-speed approximation, Mathematical Programming, optimization