Robustness in railway transportation scheduling

Railway scheduling has been a significant issue in the railway industry. Over the last few years, numerous approaches and tools have been developed to compute railway scheduling. However, robust solutions are necessary to absorb short disruptions. In this paper, we present the robustness problem from the point of view of railway operators and we give some guidelines to measure robustness in timetabling. We have developed some formulae to compare robustness between two timetables based on the study of railway infrastructure topology and buffer times. Thus, each buffer time is pondered by some factors such as tightest tracks, number of subsequent trains, remaining stations, etc. This method is inserted in MOM¹, which is a project in collaboration with the Spanish Railway Infrastructure Manager (ADIF).