Low-Level Modeling for Routing and Scheduling Trains through Busy Railway Stations with Expandable Coupling/Decoupling Mechanism

This paper studies train routing and scheduling problem for busy railway stations. The train routing problem is to assign each train to a route through the railway station and to a platform in the station. The train scheduling problem is to determine timing and ordering plans for all trains on the assigned train routes. Our objective is to allow trains to be routed in dense areas that are reaching saturation. Unlike traditional methods that allocate all resources to setup a route for a train until the route is freed, our work focuses on the use of resources as trains progress through the railway node. This technique allows a larger number of trains to be routed simultaneously in a railway node and thus reduces their current saturation. In this paper, we consider that trains can be coupled or decoupled and trains can pass through the railway station without stopping at any platform. To deal with this problem, this study proposes an abstract model and a mixed-integer linear programming formulation to solve it. The method is illustrated on a didactic example.