Railway Timetable Rescheduling Based on Priority and Train Order Entropy

Abstract

How to reschedule the railway timetable is an important problem in real train operations and management. The main purpose of dispatchers is to minimize the total delay time in the network, which is the sum of time difference between the original timetable and the rescheduling one. This difference is called the disorder. In the railway network, the disorder of trains caused by the timetable rescheduling can be expressed by train order entropy. In this paper, a binary mixed-integer programming model is proposed to reschedule the timetable in the emergent incidents based on priority and train order entropy. In addition, a heuristic algorithm based on the depth-first search method is designed to solve the proposed programming starting at the root and exploring as far as possible along each branch before backtracking. Finally, the total delay time and the train order entropy for the reschedule scheme are discussed. Different emergency incidents are analyzed showing that the duration time of the incident will have a great influence on delay time and train order entropy.