An integrated train scheduling and infrastructure development model in railway networks

The evaluation of the railway infrastructure capacity is an important task for railway companies. The goal is to find the best infrastructure development plan for scheduling new train services. The question addressed by the present study is how the existing railway infrastructure can be upgraded to decrease the total delay of existing and new trains with minimum cost. To answer this question, a mixed-integer programming formulation is extended for the integrated train scheduling and infrastructure development problem. The train timetabling model deals with the optimum schedule of trains on a railway network and determines the best stop locations for both the technical and religious services. We developed two heuristics based in variable fixing strategies to reduce the complexity of the problem. To evaluate the effect of railway infrastructure development on scheduling of the new trains, a sequential decomposition is adopted Iranian railway network. The outcomes of the empirical analysis performed in this study allow to gain beneficial insights by identifying the bottleneck corridors. The result of the proposed methodology shows that it can significantly decrease the total delay of new trains with the most emphasis on the bottleneck sections.