Simultaneous Rerouting and Rescheduling on Rail Networks under Weather Impact

Weather events can cause significant perturbations to the operation of train services. In the UK, weather related train delays run into tens of thousands of hours each year. With the rapid advances in weather forecasting and emerging information technology systems, it is now possible to obtain highly accurate real-time forecasting data. This information can be utilised to improve the operational responses to weather events. In this paper, the authors discuss the disruptions of dynamic weather fronts on the railways, and map the moving weather fronts in terms of their temporal and spatial distributions on the network and their severity. Depending on the severity of the weather events, the disruption is modelled in terms of reduced speed restriction or track blockage. The weather will only affect the trains which travel through the impacted segment during the impacted time period. The authors formulate a mixed integer programming model to simultaneously model the rerouting and rescheduling trains under weather impact. They present a case study on a section of the UK East Coast Main Line railway with a thunderstorm moving front which causes disruption. The authors show that the proposed method could find out optimized result in feasible time.