Meta-Heuristic for inserting a robust train path in a non-cyclic timetable

ABSTRACT Many freight trains depart Swedish marshalling yards before or after their planned departure times. Today, a deviating departure time is allowed if no conflicting train path can be found a few stations ahead. This increases the risk that the train might be delayed to its destination and cause delays to other trains. We present a meta-heuristic that modifies a timetable by adding a train path (for our freight train) and, if necessary, adjusting surrounding train paths. The aim of the insertion of the additional train path and the adjustments of the existing ones is to obtain a large bottleneck robustness, that is, the largest possible minimal temporal distance to any other train in the timetable. We provide experimental results for a Swedish railway stretch with a non-cyclic timetable and heterogeneous traffic. We show that we quickly add a train path, while improving the robustness of the timetable.