Author(s)

Rémy Chevrier & François Ramond

Abstract

Railway traffic management in mass transit is often disturbed by perturbations on the running and the dwell times. Then, the headways between the trains may become insufficient and due to security distances between trains the perturbations propagate in the network and amplify. In this article, we propose a train-holding strategy in order to reset sufficient headways between trains. The mechanism is based on a heuristic which is simple and responsive. The prototype developed based on this concept was ex- perimented in a subpart of the SNCF Transilien network: the RER A and L lines. During a 2-week experimentation, the train drivers were advised to depart after a dwell time that was accurately computed. The obtained results and the experimental feedback confirm the relevance and the efficiency of such a mechanism in the mass-transit context with important flows.

Keywords

driving, dwell time, traffic management, train-holding.