Re-scheduling in railway networks

Railway transport is one of the convenient public transports, known for its safety, reliability of service, and punctuality. Railway networks, as an important part of railway infrastructure, have been extended in the scale and complexity to meet constantly increasing demand of passengers and goods transports. Since railway networks face disturbances more frequently than before as a result of severe weather conditions, signal faults, and increased demand etc., highly efficient re-scheduling approaches are needed to help train dispatchers to re-schedule trains. Many re-scheduling approaches in railway networks have been proposed considering different disturbances scenarios. These approaches are classified by their characteristics and reviewed in detail in this paper. Since re-scheduling problem is usually formulated by different models in the literature, these models are also reviewed along with the approaches. Conclusions and future work on the re-scheduling approaches are given at the end. © 2013 IEEE.