Passenger Train Re-Scheduling Model in Rail Networks under Line Blockage

Disorders in rail networks expand delays and reduce the reliability and stability of the schedule. Railway disruption management includes ways to manage the operations after the occurrences of unanticipated deviations from the original schedule. In this study, the temporary blockage of tracks in the rail network is regarded as a disruption. The occurrence time of blockage and its recovery time are given. In this paper, first the basic scheduling model with the objective of minimizing the total travel time of trains will be provided. The re-scheduling model is presented which is the extension of the basic model and the original schedule provided by the basic scheduling model will be used as an input for the re-scheduling model. The new plan includes a set of new departure times, dwell times, train running times and a set of new stops for trains on the rail network for passenger's praying. A heuristic approach was proposed to design the new plan within a reasonable time. To validate the model, the train re-scheduling model is tested for multiple disruption scenarios with different disruption recovery times on the Iranian rail network. The result indicates that the developed mathematical models have advantages in producing good recovery solution with respect to the time constraint.