078: Train Traffic Rescheduling

Proposed by Quentin Cappart, Pierre Schaus

In the railway domain, the action of directing the traffic in accordance with an established timetable is managed by a software. However, in case of real time perturbations, the initial schedule may become infeasible or suboptimal. Subsequent decisions must then be taken manually by an operator in a very limited time in order to reschedule the traffic and reduce the consequence of the disturbances. They can for instance modify the departure time of a train or redirect it to another route. Unfortunately, this kind of hazardous decisions can have an unpredicted negative snowball effect on the delay of subsequent trains.

Basically, the goal is to schedule adequately trains in order to bring them to their destination. The decision is to chose, for each train, which route it will follow and at what time. Detailled explanation of this problem are presented in [cappart2017rescheduling].