A Review of Online Dynamic Models and Algorithms for Railway Traffic Management

Railway timetables are developed to make operations robust and resilient to small delays. However, disturbances perturb the daily plan, and dispatchers adjust the plan to keep operations feasible and to limit delay propagation. Rescheduling approaches aim at updating the offline timetable at best, in the presence of delays. We present a survey of the recent approaches on online railway traffic rescheduling problems, which exhibit dynamic and stochastic (or, at least, not completely deterministic) aspects. In fact, while online static rescheduling has reached a wide degree of dissemination, much is still to be done with regard to the probabilistic nature of the railway traffic rescheduling problems, and also how to best take uncertainty into account for future states. Open challenges for the future research are finally outlined.