Challenge F: Even more trains even more on time Intelligent Network Traffic Management in Emergency Situations

The railway system is vulnerable to disruptions that require careful management of available infrastructure capacity in order to keep operations feasible and attractive for passengers and for the environment. Dispatchers manage traffic with a limited view on the network impact of their actions. Effective large scale dispatching solutions are required to better forecast the delay propagation in multiple dispatching areas. This paper describes a dispatching support system for the real-time management of disrupted traffic in large networks. We use an advanced (multi-area) version of the ROMA (Railway traffic Optimization by Means of Alternative graphs) tool that is composed by a coordinator and several local decision support systems, one for each dispatching area. This tool manages disrupted traffic on a large Dutch network including 10 areas. We consider serious disturbances on double track lines where some block sections of one track are unavailable for traffic. We start from a set of disruption resolution scenarios and compute a feasible plan of operations for each of them. For each scenario, we apply the multi-area ROMA tool in order to compute a feasible schedule of operations at the level of signal control. The traffic controllers will choose one train schedule for implementation with least delays and cancelled services. A test case is evaluated on a large part of the Dutch railway network (300 km long) with hourly heavy traffic (150 trains). We solve a set of disruption resolution scenarios and evaluate them in terms of travel times, train delays and track occupation.