Author(s)

H. Yabuki, Y. Takatori, M. Koresawa & N. Tomii

Abstract

In railway lines where trains are running densely, a small increase of a dwell time causes a delay and the delay tends to expand and propagate to many other trains. One idea to avoid such delays is to increase dwell times of trains in timetables. Increase of dwell times, however, may cause an expansion of headways and we may have to decrease the frequency, which is never allowed in a congested railway line. In this article, we propose a procedure to get a timetable in which each train is given an enough amount of dwell time without reducing the frequency of trains. Our key idea is to find a train performance curve which minimizes the departure–arrival interval of trains and to make use of the generated time to increase the dwell times. In this process, we do not stick to an idea that travel times of trains have to be minimized. Following this procedure, we can increase the dwell times without reducing the frequency. We have applied our procedure to actual timetables and confirmed that our procedure works very well.

Keywords

headway, robustness, timetable, train performance curve