Passenger-oriented railway traffic planning and management

Abstract

A major problem of public transport, and railways in particular, is to improve quality of operations by updating an offline timetable to the ever changing delays situation, in order to improve performance of the transport system. In railways, this relates to reducing train delays by reordering retiming or rerouting trains, and/or change connection plans and route advised to passengers, to improve their travel time.

Key point of research is the interaction between the problem (of the operator) to reschedule trains, and the problem (of the travelers) to find their best route in the network, given the information they might have available. In fact, changing passenger flows, for instance delaying services and dropping passenger connections, varies the setting, objective functions and constraints under which the two decision makers respectively interact. We report different methods to address this problem, also including the information one player knows about the other, by optimization, agent based simulations, game-theory and by estimating models of of human behavior based on observed actions.