Scheduling and Rescheduling of Railway Operations: A Review and Expository Analysis

✍ Scribed by Sundaravalli Narayanaswami, Narayan Rangaraj

• Book ID: 118304423
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Year: 2011
• Weight: 434 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0974-8091
• DOI: 10.1007/s13727-012-0006-x

✦ Synopsis

Railway operations are planned in four levels of hierarchy: (i) strategic, (ii) tactical, (iii) operational control and (iv) real-time control. Scheduling is an initial time allocation of resources to meet demands in completing a task and rescheduling is a later modification of such resource allocations. An extensive set of some major railway scheduling and rescheduling operations as published in literature is analyzed in this paper. We observe that many authors consider scheduling as a strategic or tactical operation and rescheduling as an operational or real-time control. Several unexplored issues that are strategic or tactical per se, but hold considerable rationale for operational and real-time control (and vice versa) of railway operations are brought out. It is interpreted that (i) in practice, both scheduling and rescheduling are inadvertently performed at all hierarchical levels and (ii) operational feasibility at a hierarchical level is dependent on effectiveness of modeling at other hierarchical levels. Finally we present an array of potential research issues that are significant in practical railway operations. Our discussions are based on an understanding of objectives, modeling details, approaches and issues arising from the diversity in railway operations and to a less detail on solution methods and techniques.