Conference article

In the operational management of railway networks, an important requirement is the fast adaptation of timetable scenarios, in which operational disruptions or time windows with temporary unavailability of infrastructure, for instance during maintenance time windows, are taken into consideration. In those situations, easy and fast reconfiguration and recalculation of timetable data is of central importance. This local and temporal rescheduling results in shifted departure and arrival times and sometimes even in modified stop patterns at intermediate stations of train runs. In order to generate reliable timetabling results it is a prerequisite that train-track assignments, as well as operational and commercial dependencies are taken into consideration. In order to refer to the right level of detail for modelling track infrastructure and train dynamics in the computer aided planning process we present a generic model that we call Track-Choice FPESP (TCFPESP), as it implements suitable extensions of the established PESP-model. We show, how the service intention (the data structure for timetable specification) together with resource capacity information entered into a standard timetabling tool like Viriato can be utilized in order to configure the TCFPESP model. In addition, we are able to calculate quantitative performance measures for assessing timetable quality aspects. In order to achieve this we present a method for evaluating travel times based on passenger routings and a method for evaluating timetable robustness based on max-plus algebra. This approach supports the planner to generate integrated periodic timetable solutions in iterative development cycles and taking into account intervals for local maintenance work.

Flexible PESP, Mesoscopic railway topology, Service Intention, Timetabling with track assignment, Timetable stability analysis