Real-time railway traffic management optimization and imperfect information: preliminary studies

Railway traffic is often perturbed by unexpected events and appropriate train routing and scheduling shall be applied to minimize delay propagation. A number algorithms for this routing and scheduling problem have been proposed in the literature and they have been tested in different traffic situations. Nonetheless, their performance are almost always studied considering perfect knowledge of future traffic conditions, which is almost impossible to achieve in reality. In this paper, we propose an experimental analysis assessing the usefulness of these algorithms in case of imperfect information. We consider RECIFE-MILP as a traffic management algorithm and advanced or delayed train entrance times in the control area as the source of imperfect information. The results show that the application of traffic management optimization allows outperforming the first-come-first-served management strategy even if the actual traffic conditions are not perfectly known by the optimization algorithm.